


To Whom All Mortals Must One Day Descend

by proser132



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, LET ME BE CLEAR THERE IS NO BAD ENDING, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Photographer Jack, Puns & Word Play, ignore the tag 'Major Character Death' because it's blatantly untrue, in that yeah there is dead stuff but it's not nearly the obstacle you'd think it is, painter Aster, the concepts of life and death are perhaps a little more mutable than first considered
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-29 11:00:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6372187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proser132/pseuds/proser132
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...all save one, that is. At least, if Jack has any say in Aster's fate (and, frankly, even if he doesn't).</p><p>Jackrabbit 2016.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Morning

**Author's Note:**

> Jack contemplates homophones and aftermath in the small of the night. He waits patiently for the inevitable, then sets out to correct it.

Jack sits in the hallway, on one of the grey chairs that have learned to slump over, to accommodate their users. The floor in front of him is the precise shade of white that only hospital tile can become under 4 am fluorescent light bulbs, one in the corner flickering a dull yellow every few seconds. The tile, despite the yellow light, remains white. It does not change. Some things do not change.

Jack, despite all appearances, is not good with change. Little changes, yes. Changes in Friday plans, changes in work schedule, changes in day to day minutiae and the perpetual morning toss up between Starbucks and the little cafe that does an amazing double espresso shot (he’s watched them, they literally run the espresso back through fresh beans. They’re insane. He loves it).

He’s always resisted the big changes, though, been dragged kicking and screaming into new situations and big moves and new jobs and he just  _ hates  _ it, he hates it with every fibre of his being, no matter how awesome it turns out in the end. He always resents, just the tiniest bit, any change. He always did, at any rate. Then, well... things changed (and wasn’t that a tired record, scratched and bumpy and loathsome, but true all the same.)

Yeah, he’d resented the move out east. He’d liked Washington, he’d liked the cold and damp, the fog. New England was cold and damp, too, even foggy, but it wasn’t the same. The sun rose on the sea, instead of setting on it. He’d hated that. Hated Maine.

He’d resented this little town. It wasn’t actually that small - especially during the summer, with all of its tourists and deep-sea fishing business and lobster everywhere good god what the fuck was up with the  _ lobster _ \- but it had felt cloying to him, too close and too - enclosed. You couldn’t lose yourself in Biddeford the way you could in Seattle.

He’d resented his job. In a town with at most twenty-thousand people to its name (he refuses to call it a city), it was easy to tell who was from around here and who wasn’t, and Jack, at best, was not from around here. He didn’t want to be. He was here on assignment - the ridiculously frivolous design firm he worked for had wanted a guaranteed photographer for the New England coastline. He’d accepted the job, because he was a  _ photographer,  _ fresh out of  _ college  _ \- sure, it was just about the weirdest thing he’d ever heard of (who kept a photographer on salaried retainer ‘just in case’ you needed coastal photographs? Wasn’t this what stock footage was for?), but job prospects outside of freelance work were slim, and he liked eating, as a general rule. He took orders when they came, remained ‘on call’ for projects in the area (he’d done a few weddings, and in one memorable case, a funeral), and got to work on his own projects in his free time. He was lucky, and he’d  _ hated  _ it. He’d had no desire to fit in.

He’d resented all of it. But he couldn’t - he  _ doesn’t _ \- resent Aster.

They’d met at work. And boy, if Jack had thought he didn’t fit in, he was practically a born and bred lobster-er (he didn’t know the fucking lingo, so sue him) compared to this guy. Taller than almost everyone else, with skin the deep dark brown of freshly turned earth, grey hair tied back from his face, a permanent scowl - in snow-white Biddeford, he stood out like a crow amongst pigeons, but if he noticed, he didn’t ever let on. Jack had been bewildered when he’d shown up to the firm’s office to drop off a portfolio spread someone had ordered and heard loud, deeply accented cursing from one of the back rooms.

‘New guy,’ the secretary had said cryptically. She was nice, in a bubbly sort of way; she was still in college, and her nails were painted a different colour every day of the year. She’d tried to ask him out once and been really understanding when he explained  _ why _ he wasn’t interested. ‘Australian.’

‘I can hear,’ Jack said, eyebrows rising. ‘At least, I think I do,’ he amended. ‘Is that even English?’

The secretary giggled, covering her mouth with her hand, fingernails bubble-gum pink today. There was a second curse and a loud thump, then silence. Jack and the secretary traded a look.

‘That didn’t sound good,’ he said slowly.

‘Should we go check on him?’ she asked, beginning to look concerned as the silence stretched on.

‘I’ll go,’ Jack offered, curious (and a little concerned himself). She nodded and waved him back, still wide eyed, and he went, walking down the hallway towards the one closed door.

Jack had always thought this room was a conference room - he’d used it himself, one of the times he had to meet with a client and look  _ professional _ , ugh - but it looked like a storage room now, boxes everywhere and looking half unpacked with reams of paper and stacks of canvas floating around. There was a suspicious pile of the boxes in the centre of the room that was quivering.

‘Hello?’ Jack had asked nervously.

‘If ye’re here to laugh, get the hell out,’ came the muffled response from beneath the boxes.

Jack bit the inside of his cheek. ‘Can’t I laugh  _ and  _ help?’ he asked, and walked over to the pile. He stopped beside them. ‘Are you just… lying there? Under the boxes?’

‘When life buries ye in art supplies,’ the voice replied dryly, ‘maybe it’s for a reason. I’ve decided to abandon the lucrative position I’ve been offered and become one with the floor.’

Jack laughed so hard he almost fell over onto the boxes. ‘So should I leave you there, or…?’

‘Fuck, no, this shite’s heavy,’ the voice said.

It took twenty minutes of careful manoeuvring (‘Don’t jostle that too much, mate, it’s all glass.’ ‘Isn’t it probably broken already?’ ‘Don’t remind me.’) before the guy was free, but they had all of the boxes neatly stacked soon enough.

‘Thank ye,’ the man had said, shaking his head roughly. His grey hair’s mostly bound back, but a few strands escaped and hang in his eyes. It was a great contrast with his skin, and Jack’s fingers itched, longing for a camera.  ‘Sorry for the mess.’

‘It’s fine,’ Jack replied with a shrug; it wasn’t like he owned the conference room. If he was being honest, he liked the cluttered look of the room much better than its prior look. ‘Are you okay? Some of that junk was heavy.’

‘S’not  _ junk _ ,’ the man said with a heavy frown. His eyes were a dark green, Jack realised, and they glowered at him beneath thick brows. ‘Paint can be heavy, mate.’

‘I believe you,’ Jack said placatingly, holding up his palms. ‘Just trying to make sure you didn’t get a concussion, or something.’

The man glared at him a little while longer, as if trying to figure out whether or not Jack was giving him shit. Jack rolled his eyes.

‘Dude. Seriously, just making sure you’re not going to drop dead. Malia would probably be the person to find you, then, and she’s a senior, she doesn’t need a dead body on top of thesis stress.’

The man snorted, and the frown relaxed. ‘I’m ace, no worries,’ he said at last. ‘Sorry. The States aren’t too welcoming. Ye’re not from around here, are ye? Ye don’t sound like ye are.’

‘West coast,’ Jack agreed. ‘Jackson O. Frost, though if you actually call me Jackson I’ll dump you in the ocean.’

‘The photographer?’ the man said, eyebrows raising. Jack blinked. ‘Sorry, the firm’s been raving about ye for the last three months,’ the man added, frowning again, though at what Jack had no idea. ‘Thought ye’d be older.’

Jack tamped down his blush with long ease - he wasn’t that good, just a guy who pointed a camera at stuff. ‘They talk me up a bit for sale value,’ he said dismissively. ‘What’d they snag you for?’

‘Commission basis,’ the man replied. ‘I’m a painter.’

‘Ah,’ Jack replied, nodding; they had high-end clients who liked to commission old portraits sometimes, though since that was typically an east coast business, where the old money was, he could see why the guy had come so far out. ‘Cool. Anyway, if you’re not going to drop dead, it was nice to meet you.’

‘Yeah, ye too,’ the man replied, and he smiled as he stuck out his hand. ‘E. Aster Bunnymund.’

Jack had gone to shake his hand thoughtlessly, then froze.

‘What?’ the man asked, frowning.

‘E. Aster Bunnymund,’ Jack repeated dumbly. ‘The guy who had that exhibit at the Gagosian on Madison Avenue?’  _.bioclockwork, _ the exhibit that Jack had stared at for hours, but that was neither here nor there. If asked, he’d read about it in a magazine (he was still annoyed at that New Yorker critic who had called it ‘steampunk trash’, because holy  _ shit _ had he missed the point of the series).

The man had shuffled a bit. ‘Aye, that was me,’ he admitted.

‘What the fuck are you doing  _ here? _ ’ Jack said blankly. Someone who could paint like that, working commissions and portraits? Jack couldn’t make the pieces fit together.

‘Ye know, people keep asking me that,’ the man said, smiling wryly. ‘It’s like all ye Americans are used to are the divas. Some of us artists just like an honest day’s work.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Jack said, eyes wide.

‘This from  _ ye? _ ’ the man snorted. ‘I’ve seen yer stuff in  _ Australia _ , and ye don’t look like ye’re over twenty.’

‘I’m twenty-six, thank you,’ Jack said, but felt embarrassed - it had been one exhibit,  _ one, _ and in a little gallery in Alice Springs. It wasn’t a big deal. 

The man had rolled his eyes, as if picking up on his thoughts. ‘Can we not do this?’ he asked, looking to the side. ‘I’d like to just be Aster, for once, if ye don’t mind.’

Jack latched onto the idea gratefully. ‘Yeah, cool, we can do that,’ he said in a rush. ‘Nice to meet you, Aster.’

‘Ye too, Jack,’ Aster said, and looked back at Jack, smiling again. ‘See ye around.’

‘Yeah, yep, can do,’ Jack had said, and fled the building like he’d been set on fire.

Jack snorts, staring at the hospital tile between his feet. It’s still white. He’d been an idiot about that first meeting, he knows. For months. He shudders a bit at the thought, wrings his hands together. Thank god Aster has the patience of a six year old, or else they’d never have become friends. Jack’s not sure where he’d be if they hadn’t. Probably not still in Biddeford, he thinks, three years later; definitely not as happy.

Aster’s become the best friend he’d never known he’d wanted, bulldozing through Jack’s awkwardness and nerves with blithe indifference. He’s clever and talented, and does a million things Jack hadn’t expected an internationally recognised artist would do. He volunteers at a community centre, teaching kids how to paint. He bakes. (He bakes  _ really well.  _ Also, Jack hadn’t known anyone still made candy by hand in this day and age.)

He’s also a grumpy homebody, which means Jack gets to drag him out and up and down the coast when he has a new project. He has a temper, which is just about the best thing, since Jack loves to rile him up. He’s deeply suspicious of anything new (a trait Jack might be encouraging, given how many times ‘something new’ is in fact ‘something made up wholesale by one Jack Frost’).

He’s handsome (god, how does someone even  _ look like that?)  _ and funny as hell, and Jack knows they’ve been dancing around that mutual attraction for three years, but they have time. And it’s fun, pseudo-flirting and real-flirting, pretending like their outings aren’t dates, pretending like they don’t know what’s coming. They have time.

They  _ had  _ time.

Jack looks up from the tiled floor to the white-washed wall. They’re the same colour. White. Dead white. Jack knows he’s pale, hair long ago dyed white and never having gone back to its original brown, skin that looks like a drawing never fully coloured in; he thinks he might just blend into the walls under the light. He wonders if that might be kinder.

He sighs aloud. Down the hall, he can hear some clamour, the sounds of doctors and nurses and surgeons, the irregular beep-beep-whine-beep of an overtaxed heart monitor.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Jack knows this like people know how to think, like a heart knows how to pump blood and lungs know how to breathe. In some weird way, he feels like this is his function: the world having come together in the precise way necessary to bring him to this moment, so that he could know this is wrong. And it  _ is _ wrong, down to the particle state, something that should never have happened.

Wrong or not, Aster is down the hall, fighting for his life in a sterile room that’s less and less sterile as blood drains from him like water. Jack isn’t there, but he can see it as if he was: it spills out onto the floor, dyeing the white, white tiles red.

Jack swallows. Homophones are weird things. Dyeing and - and dying. Christ.

He lifts his head. There is a narrow band of windows that runs the length of the hallway, up near the ceiling, on the opposite wall. The night sky has gone pale while he sat here. Its light is starting to creep into the hallway, pouring down to hit the wall behind him; he turns his head.

Beside him sits Aster. His skin is dark brown, his eyes bright green, his hair soft grey. The light goes through him and strikes the wall. He has no shadow.

Jack looks at him a long moment. He does not look at the deceptively small hole at the side of his neck.

‘I’m going to fix this,’ he says as down the hall, the heart monitor gives up and begins to whine its swan song.

Aster places his hand on Jack’s. It’s gentle pressure, but there’s no body warmth. It’s real, but it has no presence.

_ I know ye will, _ he mouths solemnly. There is no sound.

Jack nods, turns his hand to hold Aster’s more firmly.

He looks up at the windows, and does not think of any homophones for morning.


	2. Murder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aster dies. It's not quite the final, unquestionable event he'd thought it would be.

Aster doesn’t realise what’s going on, at first. He’s ducked into the Chinese restaurant Jack loves (he personally detests their fried rice, but he’d come to terms with the fact that he’d put up with much worse for Jack some years back), thinking that he’ll surprise Jack with some tucker. He’d been up late the past week - something about trying to get some night shots off the coast, but the weather only cooperating in twenty minute bursts once a night.

Aster understands only the absolute basics about photography - point, click the button, probably fuss about lighting more than a portrait painter - but god, he loves to hear Jack rant about it. He has such a passion for every tiny detail about what he does, from the precise angle of moonlight to ocean spray to atmospheric conditions on his film, blue eyes lit from behind like he has a sun in his skull. Aster knows he does the same thing if someone asks about painting - his preferred medium is oil, but he can yabber on for hours about watercolours, too. Jack goads him into it sometimes, and Aster finds himself four hours later in the middle of a demonstration of resist techniques with Jack watching him, this smile on his face… Aster probably has the same expression on now. He always does if he thinks too long on Jack.

He’d figured Jack could use a treat, especially if he was going out again tonight. He’d stepped into the restaurant.

It takes him four seconds to realise that the customer at the counter isn’t a customer at all.

There’s some shouting in Cantonese, the robber yelling back in English, the waving around of some pistol - he doesn’t know guns, can’t recognise it off the top of his head. A revolver, maybe. The young girl behind the counter is shoving money into a bag, face wet from sobs; the robber turns at the sound of the door, pointing the gun at Aster.

Aster goes to raise his hands, just to show he’s unarmed (isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?). The kid’s face - and god, he isn’t no more than a kid, either, no mask or hat or hood to hide his scared brown eyes and pale skin, thick with freckles - goes slack with surprise. Aster watches in the sort of slowed-time he’d always thought was just a movie myth as the kid’s finger tightens on the trigger, and thinks, so sadly,  _ oh, kid, I’m so sorry - _

It doesn’t feel like anything else he’s ever felt. It hurts - he knows it hurts, christ, he can feel it, and his hands are around his own throat and he’s bleeding like a fountain, and he’s having trouble thinking. He thinks he hears sirens in the distance, but that might be the ringing in his ears.

The kid sprints past him, shoving his way out the door, and Aster staggers to the side, landing heavily on the floor. Fuck. Fuck. There’s screaming, his hoarse, wet shouts and the girl’s shrieks into a phone, and he wants to say something to make it stop but is too busy trying to keep his blood in his body. It isn’t staying. It isn’t staying.

Christ. What is he supposed to do? Pressure, he thinks he remembers, pressure on the wound but it’s his  _ neck _ and he thinks from the blood loss it might have hit the artery and any more pressure and he won’t be able to breathe, he has to breathe, has to keep breathing, has to stay calm or his pulse will pump him dry -

His thoughts aren’t clear, he realises. He can’t see. He thinks he might have closed his eyes, but he doesn’t  _ know _ .

Hands touch him, and he doesn’t even think  _ oh thank god _ or  _ stop that hurts _ , he just thinks  _ christ I put Jack as me emergency contact I don’t know anyone else he’s going to hear this christ this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong - _

There is a sound like water in his ears, like when he’d go swimming in the rivers near his childhood home and he thought he could hear the paddling of one of the big freshies, right before he scrambled out of the water. There is nowhere to swim. He thinks he might have batted at someone, told them to shove off, but he has no idea which way is up or even if he is standing (had he fallen? Hadn’t the kid shoved him? Why can’t he remember?) and it hurts, it hurts it hurts  _ it hurts - _

Light. Bright light - not white, the way he’d been told. He thinks. Maybe.

_ This is wrong. _

That isn’t his thought.

‘Hello?’ he asks. The word comes out wet-sounding.

_ You are not meant to be here. _

Aster isn’t sure what that means. ‘Sorry?’

_ You are early. And late. And should not be here. _

‘Er.’

There is a sound like sighing. He thinks he can feel something cutting at his neck, but it doesn’t really  _ hurt,  _ it’s just the awareness that it’s happening. He can’t see it, and not just because it’s his neck. He isn’t sure he  _ has _ a neck here. Wherever  _ here _ is.

_ You must go back. He will help you. _

‘Who? What are ye on about?’

_ Go back, E. Aster Bunnymund. Remember what has not happened yet. Imagine what is not yet real. Gain a voice. Give a heart. Do the impossible. _

Aster bites his metaphorical tongue on the retort he wants to give  _ that _ .

‘Am I dead?’ he asks instead.

_ Not yet. _

That isn’t ominous. He swallows. ‘Are ye God?’

_ Yes. And no. It’s complicated. _

He thinks he hears laughter.

_ Isn’t it always? _

‘Can I go home?’

_ Where is home? _

Aster pauses. Part of him wants to say Australia - his little town, Woop Woop in the middle of nowhere, the river and the tiny house and the family that isn’t even there anymore, hasn’t been there since he was sixteen and ran as far and as fast as he could go. Another part of him - a big part, he’s stunned to find - isn’t saying any place he’s ever been. It just says a name. Simple, and plaintive, and so damn honest that it hurts to hear.

He opens his mouth. ‘Jack. Jack’s home.’

_ Then go there. Go home. _

It gets dark. Then light again. It hurts - more than he’d thought his whole body could hurt - but only for an instant. It’s gone the next second.

He’s sitting in a chair. The hallway is dim, a washed-out, tired white colour. Everything is white, save the chair he’s sitting on. The sun is creeping in through the windows across the hall, and he can feel its warmth very, very distantly. The night has passed.

Jack is sitting beside him. They sit like that for a minute, and Aster can hear the frantic sounds down the hall. He knows he is in there. His body is in there. He wonders if his body knows yet.

Jack turns, looks him square in the eye. He looks so tired, like he’s aged ten years in an hour, but he’s still so goddamn beautiful. Dark circles beneath haunting blue eyes, white hair in a messy fall that Aster’s sketched a thousand times, and Aster wants to kiss his pale cheeks, his nose, his mouth, tell him it’s alright. He wonders how Jack can see him. He wonders if this is the ‘he’ he’d heard mentioned.

Jack nods, the tiniest bit. Aster doesn’t think Jack knows he’s done it. ‘I’m going to fix this,’ he says, and there is nothing in him to doubt. Aster doesn’t just believe him, he knows what Jack says to be the absolute truth.

He trusts Jack. He’s just not sure if he believes in himself.

He tries to touch Jack’s hand. It feels like there’s a thick wad of cotton between them, like Aster’s trying to hold his hand through a blanket. At least there’s some sensation, he thinks, but he somehow doubts he could do more than this. He’s little more than a ghost, now, he should be grateful for what little he has.

_ I know ye will,  _ he tries to say. There is no sound, not to his ears. Not to Jack’s, either, judging the way Jack watches his mouth then nods again, more firmly this time.

Jack takes his hand more fully, the distance achingly obvious even when they’re touching, and Aster wonders why they put this off so long, why he hadn’t just kissed Jack when he’d had the chance -

_ I love ye, _ he mouths, but Jack is looking up at the windows, his hand tight on Aster’s.

Aster prays he’ll have the chance to say it where Jack can hear it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A good chunk shorter than yesterday, but a lot more packed in. As became something of a trend with Aster's chapters.
> 
> Forewarning: tomorrow's chapter is a behemoth, because each chapter was a separate part of the story and I didn't bother to try and keep to strict wordcounts. Jack, uh, just has a lot to do. And a lot of feelings.
> 
> Aster does too, but that'll have to wait for Myth. :D


	3. Memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack and Aster are caught up in the grinding gears of time's steadily marching machine, and like all things, only time will tell if they're on the right path. Help along the way, though, is always appreciated (even if it is a little strange).

Jack closes the door to his apartment. It wasn’t a long drive from the hospital, but he feels as though he just drove a thousand miles.

Aster - with no shadow, with no sound, but still Aster,  _ Jack’s Aster  _ \- sits on the couch, looking just as stunned as Jack feels. Jack can’t imagine what it must feel like, hearing that you’re dead from a doctor in a clean jacket. The jacket was meant to spare Jack’s feelings, to make it look like the doctor wasn’t covered in the last moments of Aster’s life, but he’d forgotten to wipe his forehead. The speckled blood told the story.

Jack is silent. It doesn’t feel right, to try to talk right now. Aster was dead. Aster is sitting on his couch. Aster was murdered in a robbery gone wrong. Aster is watching him like he’s afraid  _ Jack  _ is the one who could disappear any second.

They can touch, a little. A hand on his is about the extent of it; when Aster had attempted a hug as soon as they’d entered the parking lot, Jack’s arms had gone right through him. Aster had looked so horrified Jack had immediately taken his hand and hauled him to his crappy car, set him in the passenger seat, and driven haphazardly, changing gears with his left hand when he needed to and steering with his knees. Anything to hold on.

He walks over and sits beside Aster. Aster looks miserable. Jack takes his hand again.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, clearing his throat a little.

Aster shrugs. He can’t talk now; Jack isn’t sure if that’s because of the throat-thing or the dead-thing. He misses Aster’s voice, the thrum and drawl, the strine only marginally softened by years in the States.

‘Do you think you could pick up a pencil?’ Jack says, hating how goddamned  _ childish _ it sounds. Aster frowns a minute, then nods, before picking up Jack’s hand and shaking it a little. Not at the same time, Jack guesses, and says so; Aster nods again, looking relieved at having been understood.

‘Should I -’

Aster is reluctant, but lets go. It is a physical pain in Jack’s chest, the loss of contact, and he ends up holding onto his knees with knuckles gone white as Aster reaches over to the little jar of pens and pencils Jack keeps on the coffee table.

Jack wants this experiment over with already (ignores the part of him that says he’s so lucky, so, so lucky to have this chance), wants Aster’s hand back in his. He doesn’t know this all means, yet. He knows he’s going to fix this, is  _ determined _ to fix this, and for that reason he doesn’t just snatch Aster’s hand back. If it’s greedy, to want to hold Aster’s hand, to want any part of him he can still hold onto (and Jack thinks it is), then he at least doesn’t have to give in.

Aster can, indeed, use a pencil. He looks relieved when this is proven, and Jack could kiss him, would kiss him if he could.

Quickly, in his tiny, looping handwriting, Aster writes out,  _ Are you alright? _

Jack can’t help it - he laughs, and it sounds like he’s gone crazy, a little. ‘Am  _ I _ alright?!’ he gasps out, Aster staring at him. ‘Am I - you - are you  _ crazy? _ ’

Aster gives him an unimpressed look. Scrawls out  _ No. But I did just die. _

Jack chokes at that, at the way it’s written so plainly on the paper. ‘Don’t say that,’ he snaps. ‘Don’t. You’re not dead. I won’t let you.’

Aster’s face becomes pitying.  _ Jack. I’m dead. _

‘Stop it.’

_ Jack _

‘ _ Stop it! _ ’ Jack shouts, snatching the pencil from Aster’s fingers. ‘You’re not. I said I’ll fix this, and I  _ will.’ _

Aster just takes the pencil back, without much effort.  _ How? You can’t fix everything, Jack. You can’t fix death. _

‘I can, and will,’ Jack replies furiously. ‘This is wrong. This shouldn’t have happened.’

Aster freezes.

‘What?’

_ Something said the same thing.  _ _ When I was still  _ _ wait, no, I must have been dead by then. _

‘What are you talking about?’ Jack demands.

Aster taps the pencil on the paper.

_ I don’t remember. I remember a voice. I remember it saying this was wrong. I remember it telling me _

Aster pauses, then nods.

_ to remember what has not happened yet. Imagine what isn’t yet real. Find a voice. Give a heart. Do the impossible. _

‘Very clear,’ Jack mutters.

_ I almost about ripped it a new one, I remember that. _

Jack laughs, softly. He can just imagine.

‘So,’ he says after a moment, ‘mystical instructions from a voice beyond death. You’re -’ he still can’t say it, but Aster seems to understand. ‘And in my apartment. On my couch.’

_ Not a normal Saturday morning. _

‘You’re always on my couch on Saturday. You have to sleep off your hangover  _ somewhere _ .’

_ I just tell you that so you’ll let me stay the night. _

Jack smiles. ‘Knew it, you big faker.’

Aster sets down the pencil and takes Jack’s hand again. It feels like pressure, no warmth to back it up, but Jack’s never wanted so badly to kiss someone in his life.

It’s waited this long, he figures. A little longer won’t kill him.

‘I think I know where to start,’ he says, and Aster squeezes his hand.

  
  


One does not live in any New England town for three years without having heard at least  _ some _ of the local stories. Mostly, they’re little things. Urban legends.

_ The entire family was killed by a ghost in the Talbot House, at the end of Rhiennman Circle. There’s an old train bridge over Swamp Road, and if you cross under it at 12:01 on Halloween, you’ll go back in time. The ship sank off Boon Island, because the lighthouse keeper had died in his sleep and didn’t light the lamp; now it patrols the waters, to keep that from happening again. _

Jack likes stories. Always had, even as a kid; when he moved to Biddeford, before he’d met Aster, he’d heard a few of the town’s. Apparently, Biddeford collects weird stuff better than New Orleans.

Something Aster had written rings in Jack’s head like a bell, and he knows where to go.

Malia had told him this story, ages and ages ago, before she moved out of state to pursue her post-graduate degree. There was a witch, she’d said, who lived on East Abbott, who aged backwards.

‘Like Merlin?’ Jack had asked, eyebrows rising.

‘Exactly,’ Malia had said, her oak-brown nails tapping on the desk. ‘She remembers things that haven’t happened yet, but she can’t remember even a day past. If you meet her twice, one day apart, you have to introduce yourself all over again.’

Jack had been sceptical. Which was fair, since Malia had to admit to never having met Ms. Bharandi herself. But Ms. Bharandi is a real person, when he checks the phonebook, and that’s how he’s found himself standing in front of a neat, pastel pink house on East Abbott Street in downtown Biddeford, hoping he’s not about to make an idiot out of himself.

Aster stands behind his shoulder, a looming and familiar presence; his hand remains firmly in Jack’s, a point of solid contact in a vaporous world. People don’t seem to see Aster - Jack being the recipient of a few odd looks, his hand wrapped around nothing - but no one has walked through him. There seems to be an instinctive avoidance in everyone they passed on the walk here. A person would step aside, out of Aster’s way, and then shake their head, visibly confused as to why they’d taken two steps to the right.

Jack takes a deep breath, and goes to knock on the door. It opens before his knuckles hit the wood.

A very short, very brightly clothed woman is standing behind the door. Her sari is a vicious green with gold embroidery, choli eye-shatteringly pink, yellow and purple and green feathers entwined in her hair and down in her braid; somehow, it works. She smiles up at him, teeth very white and eyes very purple against her dark skin.

‘Jack, hello!’ she says, voice a thick Maine accent, which surprises Jack, a little. Also, her knowing his name.

His heart about stops when she turns to his right and her friendly smile remains. ‘And Aster, good to see you!’

Aster’s hand tightens painfully around Jack’s.

‘Can you see him?’ Jack whispers. Ms. Bharandi gives him a sympathetic look.

‘No, but I know he’s there,’ she says. ‘You two should come on in, it starts raining in three minutes.’

He follows her dumbly inside, taking off his shoes at the indicated mat. She settles them in her brightly pink and purple living room, goes to fetch the tea kettle she had going. She walks back into the room as the first of the raindrops begin to hit her windows.

‘Can you see the future?’ Jack blurts out, very confused. Ms. Bharandi shakes her head, smiling.

‘Think of it like - I’m reading the book backwards,’ she says, pouring his tea. It’s masala chai, from the smell. ‘I know what’s going to happen, but I don’t always know what  _ made _ that happen. I’m a good guesser, though.’ She laughs, high and musical. She looks to Jack’s right again, where Aster is fidgeting. ‘I’d offer you tea, dearie, but I’m afraid it would go right through you.’

Jack laughs despite himself, a little horrified, but when he looks over at Aster, the man is grinning. Okay. They can do this. They can.

‘So,’ she says, sitting down. ‘Tell me why you’re here.’

Jack nods. ‘Okay, uh. Ms. Bharandi -’

‘Call me Tooth, dearie, all my friends do.’

‘Okay,’ Jack agrees, and wonders whether she got the nickname from her grin, or whether she was a dentist in the past. Her future. He stopped trying to think about it so hard, because it was making his head hurt. ‘Tooth. So, my best friend is dead.’

She nods very seriously in the span of time it takes Jack to swallow, to accept that he’d just said that. Aster squeezes his hand. It’s about the only way they can talk.

Jack nods back, bolstered by her serious look. ‘When, uh, he went into the light - apparently that’s a real thing - he was told that he wasn’t supposed to be there. I don’t think he’s supposed to be dead. And the light or whatever told him to find someone who remembers stuff that hasn’t happened yet.’

Ms. Bharandi - Tooth - nods again. ‘That would be me,’ she says, and takes a sip of her tea, pale with milk. ‘Though they’ve happened already, for me.’ She gives him a steady look. ‘That’s not all, though. Keep going.’

Jack looks at Aster, who’s watching him with green eyes, bright and compassionate. ‘I promised I would fix this,’ he says quietly, meant for Tooth to hear, but Aster to see. ‘I’m going to. I’m not sure how, yet, but -’ he looks back at Tooth. ‘Do you know if I - if we get him back?’

Tooth looks at him. It’s neither sad nor happy, so he doesn’t panic.

‘I don’t just remember the future,’ she starts, and Jack knows not to interrupt. ‘I remember the ideal future. I remember the best possible outcome.’ She smiles at him. ‘People are unpredictable, though. I don’t always know how things came about. I don’t even know how I got my own nickname, yet!’ she laughs a bit. ‘People make decisions and sometimes, the ideal future doesn’t look ideal to everyone. And I have to make the decision, each and every day, to tell someone what is coming - or to not.’

She reaches out, unerringly, to place her hand atop Aster’s, where it’s entangled with Jack’s. The hand goes a little thinner, unable to handle so much contact so well, but holds.

‘I’m not going to tell you,’ she says. ‘But I can give you a memory of what’s coming. It’s going to be your decision what to do with it, when to use it.’

She smiles at them. ‘But no matter what you do, my dears, it’s the right decision. You will come to where you are supposed to be, even if it doesn’t look the way you thought it would.’

She pulls away and reaches into the folds of her sari over her shoulder. From it, she withdraws a box, tiny and intricate, gold and white, hints of pearlescent colour at every angle.

‘This is for you two,’ she says, and places it delicately in Jack’s hand. ‘When you’re ready, open the box. Or don’t. You’ll know when it’s time.’

She laughs then, startling Jack, who almost drops the box before he shoves it into the pocket of the brown hoodie he threw on before leaving his apartment. ‘Oh, I almost forgot! Silly of me.’

She takes out a piece of paper. ‘To imagine what isn’t real yet,’ she says, handing the paper over as well.

Jack stares at her. ‘I didn’t say anything about that,’ he protests. ‘I never mentioned the imagination thing, or the - is this another one of those future things?’

‘Everything’s a future thing when it comes to me, dear,’ she replies with a wink. ‘Now, drink your tea, dear, and eat something; you won’t be eating for a while, and the rain won’t stop for another twenty-two minutes.’

 

The paper Tooth gave Jack is remarkably unhelpful.

‘St. North,’ Jack reads aloud as he walks to his car (Tooth warned them this would be a bit more of a journey). People give him a wide berth, though Jack is certain that has less to do with him audibly talking to no one and everything to do with Aster insisting on walking beside him, fingers tangled together. He doesn’t care. He’s not letting go for anything less than the end of the world. ‘That’s it? What is that, a street? A church?’

Aster tugs on his hand, drawing his attention away from the slip of paper, and mimes using a pencil. Jack nods, shoves the paper in his pocket with the box.

They speedwalk to the car, still parked in front of Jack’s apartment, and Jack immediately goes rummaging through his dash for something to write with and something to write on, one knee on the passenger seat. He emerges with a napkin and a half-dead pen, only to turn around and find Aster some feet away.

‘What’s up? Is something wro-’ he starts to ask, before he realises that Aster is looking away, his expression a little chagrined. ‘Were you checking me out?’ Jack asks, delighted; he loves catching Aster in the act, the flustered way he protests and says…

Right, the pen and napkin. He can’t talk right now. He wipes off the hood of the car with his sleeve, and holds out the pen for Aster to take.

Aster does so, and looks Jack square in the eye.

_ Can ye blame me?  _ He mouths very clearly, and though Jack can see the way he fidgets a little as he does so, Jack can’t help the way he goes a little red. Yeah, he knows Aster was checking him out. But normally Aster would deny, deny, deny, and Jack would tease him until he managed to change the subject; not this straightforward earnestness.

Jack ducks his head, coughs a little. ‘Uh, thanks,’ he says, and feels Aster brush past him, bending over the napkin.

He looks back up when he hears Aster stop writing, and Aster is waiting patiently; his smile is a little hesitant, but maybe a little triumphant, too. Jack’s main defence in this game of theirs is that Aster didn’t yet know how much his earnest kindness, his honesty, affects Jack. Seems the cat is out of the bag, on that one.

Jack smiles back. About damn time.

He takes the paper, and looks down at what Aster’s written.

_ It’s a business. St. North’s Woodworking and Sculpture. A bit up the coast - maybe half an hour’s drive if the traffic’s good. _

‘A business?’ Jack repeats aloud. ‘Really? How is this going to help us?’

Aster shrugs, takes back the napkin delicately. He adds,

_ don’t know, Jack, but she knew a lot. I reckon we should trust her. _

Jack takes a deep breath. ‘Okay, okay,’ he says. ‘We go to this - St. North’s.’ He shivers. ‘Maybe this visit will be less - weird.’

Aster nods in agreement.

  
  


They are, as is happening more and more often, wrong.

Jack is becoming very good at driving one handed, his right hand tangled with Aster’s left over the centre console; if Jack isn’t looking, if he can’t see the way the weak grey light of a spring storm casts no shadows on his passenger seat, he can imagine -

But, no. He still has no idea what it will be like, to hold Aster’s hand while they drive along the coast; there’s no body warmth, and worse in a million different ways, it’s no loose, relaxed grip. It’s the hard pressure of comfort, Aster uncertain and nervous in a way he so rarely is, and Jack can’t make himself enjoy this, not when Aster is…

‘We should do this,’ Jack says as they near their destination. He sees Aster look over, from the corner of his eye; the road is ridiculously curved, though, and he does not take his eyes from the wet asphalt. ‘After, I mean. When you’re back. We should go driving, as far as we can go. See where we end up, it could be fun.’

Curve dealt with, he glances over at Aster, who’s gazing at him with the softest look Jack has ever been the recipient of.

He squeezes Jack’s hand.  _ We should, _ he mouths, over-emphasizing the words.

Jack smiles at him, then looks back to the road just in time to catch their turn.

After another half mile, they pull up to a garishly painted building, which a large, flashing sign announces to be ‘St. North’s Woodworking and Sculpture - You Imagine, We Create!’

Jack parks the car, and shakes his head at the sign. ‘Maybe we’re taking this too literally,’ he says, doubtful.

Aster fishes around for the napkin, flips it over, and writes out,  _ we agreed to trust Tooth, Jack. _

‘I know,’ Jack groans, waiting for Aster to finish his sentence, even though he knows what it’s going to say. ‘But this place looks like the aftermath of a Christmas party. One of the drunk ones.’

Aster looks at him, then around, then nods.  _ Yeah, you’re not wrong, _ he writes, and Jack laughs.

They get out of the car into a light drizzle, and they walk up to the main door, wreathed in Christmas lights of every imaginable colour.

‘What’s with these people and their tastes in colour?’ Jack complains, and his hand is jostled a little as Aster laughs, full and silent, shoulders shaking.

Inside, there’s a desk, dwarfed utterly by the massive man sitting behind it. Wild grey mane is indistinguishable from eyebrows is indistinguishable from beard, and dark eyes look balefully from behind all the hair. A neat little nameplate sits before him, and Jack thinks the name  _ Phil  _ is a little misleading. It sounds like a guy who should be balding, at the very least.

‘Hi,’ Jack says, holding tightly to Aster’s hand. ‘We were sent here by Priya Bharandi?’

The man continues to glare at him.

‘Uh,’ Jack laughs nervously, ‘You might know her as Tooth?’

The man’s entire demeanour changes; suddenly, Jack’s left hand is shaken vigorously, the man sparing only a cursory glance at Jack’s seemingly occupied right hand, and he’s being dragged past the desk and into the  _ loudest place he’s ever been _ .

Everywhere, no matter where he looks, there are  _ people,  _ and good god, they’re all as large (if not larger) than Phil, hefting great logs or blocks of stone, carving, chipping away, voices as harsh as the sounds of tools. And the hair. Not a damn person here, man nor woman, has hair shorter than their waist, and it’s bushy and thick and a million different shades of white and grey and straw blond -

Aster holds tightly onto his hand, nervous, and Jack nods, even as he’s carted around. This is for Aster.

Suddenly, he can’t think of anything strange enough to turn him aside.

Phil shouts in a loud, snapping language, half-growl and half-word - Russian, maybe, or Polish, Jack can’t tell - and is answered with an even louder shout of joy.

‘Thank you, Phil!’ shouts the voice, and several of the massive people step aside to show a marginally shorter man, who’s beaming at Jack with all of the bright joy of someone finally reunited with an old friend. ‘Jack!’ he shouts (does this guy operate at any other volume? Or is it a side-effect of working in such a noisy place?) as he strides over. ‘I have been waiting very long time for today! Is such wonder to see you at last!’

‘Uh, thanks,’ Jack says, still a little stunned by the volume. ‘Sorry, I don’t -’

‘Is alright! I am Nicholas St. North! Call me Nick!’

Jack suddenly worries every sentence is going to end in an exclamation point. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he replies, polite.

‘And Aster!’ Nick says, turning to Jack’s right. Aster flinches back, startled, and Jack turns automatically, making sure he’s alright. Aster flaps his free hand, annoyed at him, and Jack has to swallow down his relief. ‘Good to see you - figuratively, of course! Follow me - we have much to speak about!’

He turns and is almost immediately lost in the sea of massive people, and Jack drags Aster after him, not wanting to lose their host a few seconds after having met him.

Through the madness they wind, until Nick ushers them both into an office and shuts the door behind them. The volume level drops by three quarters immediately, and Jack sighs.

Aster’s hand detangles from his and rises to cup the back of his neck. Jack looks over, startled, and Aster mouths,  _ Are ye alright? _

‘Fine, Bun-bun,’ Jack says, and grins at Aster’s scowl. ‘Just loud.’

‘Is  _ very _ loud,’ Nick says, and thank god, his voice is quieter. Still loud, in the enclosed room, but tolerable. ‘Ye - employees, they speak very loudly, even when not working! I am used to it, but guests? Customers? Pah, it is much for delicate American ears.’

Jack isn’t sure if he should be offended by that.

‘But, enough! We have much to speak of. Please, take seats, take seats!’ Nick gestures to two chairs in front of a massive wooden structure that Jack thinks might be a desk but doesn’t want to get it wrong. ‘You have seen Tooth, yes?’

‘Just this morning,’ Jack agrees as they sit; Aster’s hand remains on the back of his neck, thumb sweeping along his hairline. It’s a little distracting. ‘It was - uh, an eye opener.’

‘Tooth is very special lady, yes,’ Nick says with a gentle smile. ‘It takes time to be used to her - though, she would tell you same thing.’ He takes a seat behind the desk (Jack decides that must be what it is, though  _ workbench _ would probably cover it, too). ‘So. Tell me story! From beginning! All I know I have learned from Tooth, and she is not clearest, sometimes; is worse, because English is my fourth language, and we share no others.’

Jack swallows hard. ‘Well, okay. What do you know?’

Nick’s face takes on some kind of light, a cast of features Jack remembers last seeing on a storyteller he’d seen at summer camp as a kid. ‘Two men will come to you,’ he says, words sounding like they were borrowed from someone else’s voice. ‘One living, one dead; one pale, one dark; one seen, one invisible. You will know what to do.’

Jack waits a minute, but that seems to be it, because Nick’s face loses the cast and he settles back into his seat, beaming at them both.

‘Uh, no offence to Tooth,’ he says after a minute, ‘But that’s almost as unhelpful as what Aster heard.’

‘Is unfortunate truth of world,’ Nick replies wisely, ‘that things most necessary to know are also often vaguest. Until, of course, they come to pass.’

Jack snorts, and beside him, Aster does the same thing; Jack can hear it in his head, but the sound isn’t in his ears. At least he feels the shift of Aster’s hand on the back of his neck.

‘So, story!’ Nick insists, sitting forward again. ‘Come, come. I have known day was coming for long time, and I am very curious man!’

‘It’s not a happy story,’ Jack answers slowly.

‘Yet,’ Nick says, and Jack decides that for all his weirdness, he likes him.

‘So - uh, Aster died,’ Jack begins, then frowns. ‘I don’t know the whole story there - hey, Aster?’

Aster tilts his head over to Jack, eyebrow raised.

‘What  _ did _ happen?’

Aster blinks. Mimes a pencil.

‘Hey, Nick, do you have a pencil, or something? And paper?’ Jack asks, turning to Nick again. ‘Aster’s gonna write it out.’

Nick looks a little stunned. ‘He can move pencil?’

Jack frowns again. ‘Should he not be able to?’

‘He  _ is _ ghost, yes?’

Jack looks helplessly at Aster, who shrugs helpless back. ‘Probably?’ Jack offers, and Nick just looks confused as he passes over a pencil and a sheet of yellow paper.

With an apologetic glance to Jack, Aster takes his hand from the back of his neck and picks the pencil off the desk surface. Nick sucks in a breath, and watches avidly as Aster writes out, neat and polite,

_ Hello, Nick. Nice to meet you. _

‘Amazing,’ Nick breathes. ‘How strange! Nice to meet you, as well, Aster! Is great honour!’

Aster shoots Jack an amused glance.

_ You, too. Not sure why it’s an honour, but _

‘Oh, is honour because Tooth has always spoken very highly of you,’ Nick says, interrupting. Jack rolls his eyes; it’s sort of rude, but Nick probably doesn’t think of it that way.

Aster looks at Jack again, the same expression on his face, and looks over at Nick.

‘Can you let him write out his sentences?’ Jack asks, picking up on Aster’s intent. ‘It’s kind of the only way he can talk right now.’

Nick blinks. ‘Of course, my apologies.’

_ It’s alright, _ Aster writes out.  _ Give me a mo, it’ll take a minute to get down. _

‘Take time! Is difficult to speak of, I would imagine.’

After a few minutes of busy scribbling, Aster passes the paper over, and Jack and Nick read it, heads bent over the page.

_ It’s not that hard, really. I stopped to pick up some grub for  _ _ Frostb _ _ Jack, he’d been working hard. Thought he should have something nice. There was a robbery, kid panicked, gun went off. Could have happened to anyone. Then there was light, a weird voice. I woke up, and I was next to Jack in the hospital chairs. From there, Jack knows the story. _

Jack’s hands are clenching, he knows it, he can feel the bones creaking underneath the thin skin, and he can’t see.

‘Jack?’ he hears from a great distance, and he looks up to see two very worried sets of eyes on him. Nick is the one who spoke - of course he was, Jack’s never going to hear Aster’s voice again and it’s  _ his fault _ -

Aster’s hand comes up and cups his cheek, thumb sweeping across the bone, and it takes everything Jack’s got - years and years of hiding behind smiles and pranks and jokes and  _ of course I’m happy, can’t you see me smiling, can’t you hear me laughing  _ \- not to break.

_ It’s not yer fault _ , Aster mouths, and Jack does what he does best - he laughs.

‘Yes, it is!’ he says, when he’s got breath again, Nick looking on with concern and Aster staring like he’s lost his mind. ‘Yes, it  _ is!  _ The only reason you were there was because I had a few late nights! I shouldn’t have told you, I knew it would have worried you, I could have - I could have -’

‘You could not have known,’ Nick says, voice terribly gentle. ‘Aster is right. Could have happened to anyone.’

‘But it didn’t! It happened to  _ him! _ ’ Jack choked out. His throat was tightening around his grief, trying to cut it off, and Jack had never been gladder for a basic bodily reaction. ‘It happened to  _ him _ and I - it’s my -’

Aster shakes him a little, hand still firm on him, sliding down to grip his chin.  _ It was, _ he mouths, so clearly trying his damndest to speak and so obviously unable to,  _ not. Yer. Fault. Please, please don’t think that. _

‘I can’t,’ Jack whispers.

_ Ye can. I know ye. _

Aster lets go of him, hand diving for the pencil and the paper, and he begins to write, pencil strokes hard enough to dent the wood beneath the paper,

_ It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. And you’re breaking my heart, I can’t do anything to help you. Please stop. _

Jack sucks in a breath. ‘I don’t need the help,’ he says. ‘You do, christ, you’re the one who’s  _ dead _ -’

_ You’re going to fix it, _ Aster replies, waving a hand to indicate that he’s interrupting, damn it, and Jack better shut his mouth.

Jack holds still for a long moment, and just holds stares with Aster.

‘Okay,’ he says raggedly after a minute, forcing the words past the bottleneck of his own throat, and Aster slumps in relief. ‘I - I’ll try.’

Aster drops the pencil and returns his hand to Jack’s face, and Jack’s never seen him so visibly  _ wanting. _ Jack’s no blushing virgin, even when he was sixteen and finally kissing George that one summer evening behind the oak tree in his backyard, but he’s never seen someone look at him like this before - like he’s the entirety of everything, a universe all to himself.

‘Are you alright?’ Nick ventures, and Jack flinches.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he says, looking over - Nick’s looking at him with concern, but not like he’s crazy, so that’s… good, Jack thinks. ‘So, uh, that’s what happened,’ he says, and picks up the paper, sets it in his lap. Aster’s hand slides back to cup his neck again, wide dark fingers like a hug and tangled in his hair. ‘The weird voice Aster mentioned told him some pretty vague junk, but it got us to Tooth, so I think it can be trusted.’

‘And you? What is your place in this?’ Nick asks, gaze trained on Jack’s face.

Jack is a little startled. ‘What?’

‘What is your place in this? Sounds to me like might be quest Aster must take on his own.’

Jack flinched, and Aster’s hand tightened in his hair. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘I don’t care if it is. I promised I’d fix it. I’m going to.’

‘Is not your fault.’

Jack laughs again. He hates the sound, right now, and cuts it off quickly. ‘I’m not going to comment on that, because Aster doesn’t want me to say that,’ he says, and Aster’s fingers curl into his scalp. ‘But even when I didn’t know - didn’t think -’ he shakes his head. ‘This is wrong. It’s not about me. Aster deserves to live.’

‘Many people deserve to live.’

Aster pulls away from Jack, gently disengaging from his hair, and picks up the pencil. He pulls the paper delicately off Jack’s lap, his fingers a brush of pressure through Jack’s jeans onto his thigh, and Jack swallows a bit. He pulls his sweatshirt down more firmly over his lap as Aster begins to write, thankful that neither of them are paying attention to him; of all the times to have  _ that _ problem, really.

_ The voice said it was wrong,  _ Aster writes out, each letter crisp and sharp as if he’s enunciating them.  _ That I was there. It said,  _ and here Aster took a short paused, clearly getting his words together,  _ you must go back. He will help you. Go back, E. Aster Bunnymund. Remember what has not happened yet. Imagine what is not yet real. Gain a voice. Give a heart. Do the impossible. _

Jack swallows hard again.

‘And you think Jack is one mentioned?’ Nick asks. ‘It could be many people.’

_ It’s him. He’s the one I went back to. It asked me where home was, and it’s him. _

Jack’s never felt so warm before, and suddenly he understands the phrase ‘his face was on fire’.

Nick looks at the writing for a moment more, then sighs; it’s not a bad sound, though. It sounds happy, and Jack looks at him, startled.

‘Good!’ Nick says. ‘You are committed to course. You must be, if you wish to succeed!’ He smiles at them both, glancing between Jack and the empty space he must see where Aster is sitting. ‘I am sorry for questions. I must be sure, you understand.’

Aster takes Jack’s hand again, and though it feels neither cold nor warm, it’s like - like Jack was carrying something really heavy (one of his photography cases, the ones filled with lighting equipment), and Aster just came along and picked up one end. A redistribution of the weight.

‘So what now?’ Jack asks, pretending he isn’t anchoring himself to Aster’s touch, it’s not the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth.

‘I give you something,’ Nick replies, and places his hand palm up on the desk. ‘Give me both your hands,’ he says, after a moment of silence; he clearly had forgotten to give them instructions. ‘I must touch you both at same time for it to work.’

Jack and Aster trade a glance, then Aster sighs inaudibly and stands. Jack lets himself be tugged to his feet, marvelling that Aster can hold his hand and pull him up, but can’t give him a hug. He wonders why for a second, before discarding the thought to focus on what’s at hand.

Aster places his hand on Nick’s first, and Nick startles a bit at the invisible touch; Jack places his hand atop Aster’s. It wavers at the contact for a moment before steadying. Jack notes that, wonders again, reminds himself that they’re doing something at the moment and he can think about it later.

Nick closes his eyes and after a minute, hums. The hum turns into a brief, bright chuckle. ‘Ah, yes,’ he says. ‘Perfect.’

He waves his free hand over theirs, and Jack blinks as Aster’s hand lifts. When he glances over, Aster looks just as bewildered.

‘You can let go,’ Nick says, humming again in satisfaction. ‘Is ready.’

Jack lifts his hand, Aster doing the same, and sitting on Nick’s hand (it definitely hadn’t been there before) is a glass orb.

No, not orb, Jack realises, looking at it curiously. An egg. A glass egg.

Nick offers it to him, and when it rolls into his hand, it’s freezing.

‘An… ice egg?’ Jack says, holding it up and ignoring the chill on his skin (he’s always been good with cold stuff. Winters in Maine have been consistently one of the few things he likes about Maine).

‘I do not choose things I make, sometimes,’ Nick says. ‘But they are what they need to be. Is very difficult with more than one person!’ he chuckles again. ‘Is thing born of your minds - old dreams, new dreams! Movements of soul. Imagination! And made of you two - I only offer way to be made.’

‘I am so confused,’ Jack says, and Nick laughs loudly, booming around the room. The egg isn’t melting at all in his fingers, not even leaving them wet, so he tucks it in his sweatshirt pocket, beside the little box from Tooth.

‘Is normal reaction, do not worry.’ He smiles at them both. ‘Now, you must get move on. You have one more stop to make today! Is most important you keep appointment!’

Jack and Aster share another glance.

‘Appointment?’ Jack ventures.

‘Yes. I have directions for you - let me guess,’ and here Nick smiles widely. ‘Tooth gave you one word, yes?’

‘Two,’ Jack replies, and Nick laughs again.

‘Here, take note,’ he says, and rolls the pencil towards Aster, who catches it. He rattles off a series of numbers, and Jack frowns as Aster scribbles them down and hands them to him.

‘Seriously? Did you just give us coordinates?’

‘There is no address, where you go,’ Nick says, and the smile he gives them is eerily reminiscent of Tooth’s, mysterious and joyful. ‘Besides - sometimes, one must find own way in world! And you two - you have chosen hard way. Time will prove whether good or bad decision!’

‘You’re a comfort,’ Jack mutters.

Aster laughs, and Jack watches his shoulders shake from the force of it, and feels the absence of sound like a physical ache.

 

They return to the car before Jack realises he’s still holding the paper in a death grip, Aster’s hand on his elbow like he thinks Jack needs the guidance.

He probably does. He doesn’t want to think about it.

A very insistent tap at his shoulder. He looks over, and Aster is watching him. Jack knows what he’s about to say, but lets Aster mouth it.

_ Are ye alright? _

‘You know,’ Jack says, patting him once and then crossing over to the driver’s side of the car, ‘I find it ridiculous that it’s  _ you _ asking  _ me _ that, okay?’

_ Why? _ Aster mouths when he’s opened the door and sat once more. Jack thinks it’s strange that Aster can only touch so much, but can affect so much more. Jack has quite a few ‘why’s he’d like to ask, himself.

‘Because you’re the one who actually - got hurt?’ Jack says, still unable to make himself say it. At Tooth’s, when he hadn’t known what he knows now, it had been hard but manageable. Now, every variation of the word ‘dead’ is clawed, clinging to the walls of his throat and refusing to enter the world. ‘Can you still - you know, feel anything?’

Aster shakes his head emphatically, green eyes like searchlights, bright, brighter than Jack remembers. More green. They’re stunning, and for a second, Jack doesn’t remember what they’re talking about.  _ I don’t hurt at all anymore, _ Aster mouths, and it slams Jack to the earth, reminds him what is really happening here.

He has to fix this. He  _ has _ to.

‘Okay,’ he says, breathing. It’s a basic thing, he does it all the time, and he doesn’t know why it’s so hard now. ‘Okay, give me a second, I’ll put the numbers into Google Maps or something, it’ll show us where we’re going -’

Aster’s fingers catch his chin, so gentle. He tilts Jack’s face up from his cellphone’s screen, and it reminds Jack of the way Aster would check the potted plants along his window sills for broken stems and wilted leaves. He’d always said he wanted a garden, like he’d had in Australia, but had never found the time. Jack at the time had the deeply embarrassing thought that they should find a house with a yard. He’d obviously not said so (in fact, he’s pretty sure he said something along the lines of ‘dude, your house is practically made out of plants anyway, it’s not like you need the encouragement’), but the thought had been there.

_ Ye didn’t answer me, _ Aster mouths.

Jack breathes. ‘I’m fine,’ he says, because all the words in the world had grown claws, too, save those. ‘I’m fine.’

Aster doesn’t believe him, he can see it in the lines of his face, but he trusts Jack and lets it go.

Jack doesn’t often let himself think it. (He’s got this thing, okay, where it’s not love unless it’s mutual, acknowledged, two or more people in this for the long haul, not going anywhere.)

(He’s had this fear for three years now, that the firm will let him go, or send him somewhere else; that Australia will call Aster back; that somehow, some way, they’ll end up on opposite ends of the earth, and if that happened, wasn’t it better to not be in love at all?)

(Wasn’t it better to pretend and just enjoy himself, rather than give in and see it all burn?)

(Isn’t it burning now?)

Jack doesn’t often let himself think it, but it’s in his mouth, the words’ claws gentled, and it takes everything he has not to say it.

He’s selfish. He wants to hear it himself, hear it in Aster’s voice (god, give him a chance to hear it in Aster’ voice) and say it back, knowing it’s heard and returned.

He doesn’t say it, but Aster takes his hand over the centre console, forcing Jack to pick out the coordinates left-handed, and he’s certain Aster knows, anyway.

The coordinates turn out to be somewhere in the middle of Maine, and Jack sighs; it’s going to be a lot of dirt roads, from what he can tell. ‘Want to make a stop back home first,’ he asks, ‘or do you just want to get going?’

Aster has a strange look on his face that Jack doesn’t understand, but only reaches for the paper again. Jack relinquishes it reluctantly; that paper is Aster’s voice, right now, and Jack would never keep it from him, but. That paper is Jack’s damnation, too, the irrefutable proof of what he’s done. And the way Aster feels about that - the way he wants Jack to not blame himself -

Aster’s writing on the paper now, having found the old, half-dead pen from before.

_ Let’s just go, _ he’s written when he gives the paper back to Jack and takes his hand again.  _ Unless you need something? _

‘No, I’m fine,’ Jack says, and this time means it. ‘Okay. Let’s go, then.’

 

The drive is long. Hours pass. The radio, predictably, picks up nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true; but Jack’s never been a big fan of country music, and he doesn’t want to listen to NPR right now. He doesn’t want to hear any local news. He doesn’t want to know what they’re saying.

He and Aster don’t talk. The difficulties of trying to read and drive, or write on the bumpy road, mean that Aster’s forced into silence. Jack is quiet in solidarity. They do cling to each others’ hands, but that’s par for the course, now (Aster’s thumb is in constant movement across Jack’s knuckles, though, and sometimes it’s hard to not look down and watch, the deep brown sweep over pale joints, the metronome regularity of his strokes).

Surprisingly, it’s good. If Jack lets himself think of what comes after all this (he’s constantly bouncing between doing so and refusing to do so), he thinks of long drives. He’s going to take Aster on them. They’ll take a road trip back west, he’ll show him Seattle, he’ll take him anywhere his heart wants to go, so long as Jack can come with him.

Not for the first time in the last twenty-four hours, Jack thinks that he’s been pretty stupid for far too long.

The rain has returned, and it’s not a downpour, but it’s steady. Jack’s not looking forward to the last leg of their trip, where they’ll have to hike half a mile into the forest. Jack likes to hike, but he’s never done it in the dark, and with the steadily deepening night that’s falling, there’s no doubt that the dark is what they’ll be hiking in. Aster’s done it before, though, and Jack’s confident they won’t get lost, and if they do, that they’ll be okay.

Even more importantly, on the other end of that half-mile is another piece of the puzzle, and if Jack just keeps trying, he could have Aster back for good. No dark stretch of woods could keep him from that.

At last, they reach the end of the logging trail (Jack refuses on principle to call it a road). Jack pulls off to the side, though he’s not sure why - it’s not like anyone will need the road. He hasn’t seen another car for an hour and a half.

Aster squeezes his hand, and Jack looks over. The last dregs of daylight, grey and muddy, should not make anyone look good; Jack wonders how far gone you have to be, to think so. Aster is still the best thing he’s ever laid eyes on.

_ Ready?  _ Aster mouths. The shape of his mouth is dear and familiar, especially around this word. How many times has Aster asked that, before projects and meetings and outings, the one time Jack had a local gallery opening, when Aster had his? Jack wonders how many times it’s been a deeper question than he heard.

‘Yeah, I am,’ Jack says, and means it in all the ways he can.

They get out of the car. It’s wet and chill; Jack’s glad for his sweatshirt, even with the ice egg from Nick inside. Cold is awesome, but cold and wet is awful when you’re not swimming. His left hand is stuffed in the pocket, protecting the little box and the egg, and his other hand finds Aster’s.

They walk through the forest. It’s dark beneath the thick boughs; it’s all pine, through here, or whatever specific tree. Jack doesn’t know, couldn’t tell even if he could see clearly. Aster could, but Jack can’t really see his face to read the answer off his lips, not without light, so he doesn’t ask. Aster is leading the way like a man on a mission, and Jack pretends for a minute that his grip is warm. He thinks it might really be, for a second.

They come into a clearing. They’ve been climbing up an incline all the way, and here, the ground rises abruptly, a bare hillock. Only grass grows here.

There is someone waiting for them.

So far, Jack has been existing in a state of gentle denial; Tooth could be explained away as someone who… well, is confused. Never mind the accurate prediction of rain, or his name, or knowing that Aster was there when Jack never said a word. There is a chance, however infinitesimal, that it can be explained away as coincidence. Nick, too, could have been confused, could have used sleight of hand, could have placed a cold glass egg in their hands. Aster is the only thing Jack trusts to be real, and Jack knows that should be the thing he distrusts most, but it’s  _ Aster.  _ Jack is a sucker; his mind will accept all sorts of impossible things to keep Aster near.

This, though, is at last strange enough to break the haze he’s been living in all day, and he stares a moment.

The man waiting for them - Jack thinks it’s a man, the features vaguely male, but what the hell does he know - honest to god glows in the darkness, golden light flaring up when he catches sight of them, shining from his skin, his hair, his robes. Robes, yeah, that’s kind of weird, but Jack is so far beyond the threshold of weird that it’s sort of hilarious that  _ that’s  _ what’s hitting him hardest. Who the hell wears robes these days who isn’t a judge or a priest?

Aster’s fallen still, staring, and the glowing man waves to them.

The question of if he can see Aster is answered when Aster very tentatively waves back, and the man’s glow brightens even further.

Jack and Aster ascend the hill, sharing a look, and Jack clears his throat nervously.

‘Hi,’ he says, and the man smiles. ‘Uh, I guess you were expecting us?’

The man nods.

Jack frowns. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ he says after a moment of silence, in which the man has stared at them both beatifically and Aster is all but twitching, his fingers tightening and loosening erratically in Jack’s, ‘but, uh, after Tooth and Nick, I was sort of expecting a bit more… questioning? Some kind of third degree interrogation.’

The man shakes his head, still smiling with the same expression of blissful contentment. It’s weird. And also soothing. Which is even  _ weirder. _

Aster looks over at Jack, eyebrow raised.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Jack says helplessly.

The man looks at Aster, and smiles again. Aster startles then, hand tightening painfully around Jack’s, and Jack bites back a yelp.

‘What? What’s going on?’

Aster holds up his free hand, and his eyes are wide, the whites frightening against the dark gilded brown of his face. He’s staring at the man like he’s being told the most riveting story he’s ever heard in his life, and it takes everything Jack has to hold still, to be patient.

The man turns from Aster to Jack, and suddenly there’s light in front of Jack’s eyes, colours and shapes he wasn’t prepared for, and he  _ does _ yelp this time, shocked and stumbling a half-step backward.

He knows what it means, he realises abruptly, the same way you know what’s already happened in a dream, even if you’ve never had it before. Bright white and fanning green, sprawling blue and lilac grey, ferns and curls and arrows and flowers, organic shells and artificial superstructures, the soft, fluffed tops of a mushroom cloud.

‘Yes,’ Jack replies, because he understands this question, and there hasn’t ever been another answer. ‘Anything. Everything. He deserves that.’

The blue again, the ferns and the curls, the superstructures; now, accompanying it, the sensation of a dolphin leaping from a cresting wave, the bright colour of a child’s laughter.

‘It’s not about me,’ Jack replies, the honesty pulled from a place inside him he didn’t know existed until this moment, but an answer he’d known all along. ‘It would make me happy, but it’s not about me. It’s about him. It’s wrong, what happened, and I can fix it, so I  _ must _ fix it.’

The mushroom cloud, again, brilliant and soft and so deadly, and still, Jack can see it, tempting to his fingers. Like falling light in a bedroom as you pull the covers up. Like sleep. Like giving in.

‘No,’ he says very firmly. ‘And you know that.’

The lights and images fade at last, become distant in the manner of all dreams; Jack’s standing, still, and Aster is hovering over his shoulder. His face is concerned, and Jack loves him for it, the word there and waiting for him, and he still won’t say it, not yet, but he can think it, and that means a lot.

Aster studies his face for another moment, before turning back to Sandy (Jack knows the name, now, and he thinks it with some fondness, even though he’s known the guy for a handful of minutes, at best).

He lets go of Jack’s hand, and Jack lets him, because sometimes you have to trust that what’s let go will return. The fear is there - oh, god, is Jack afraid - but there’s the trust, and that will always outweigh it.

Sandy tilts his head, glowing faintly brighter, and Aster nods, as if answering a question. Sandy nods back, his face going even softer, even more content.

He waves a hand, and from the depths of his sleeves comes light, or something very like it. It wreaths Aster’s head, turning his grey hair gold, his skin a warmer brown than Jack knew existed, settles in along his shoulders and like dust on his eyes. Aster visibly breathes in, and the light enters his mouth, leaving the clearing a little less beautiful in its absence.

Aster turns, looks Jack square in the eye, like he had the morning just past (and had it really just been this past morning?)

‘Jack,’ he says, and Jack goes completely still, because that is Aster’s  _ voice,  _ sure and deep and not hoarse, not wet with blood like he’d feared it would be, beautiful and familiar as a sunset on the ocean (or a sunrise, a newness, a beginning), ‘Jack, I love ye.’

Jack drops to his knees like all of his tendons have been cut, and he'll never know if his answer is a sob or a laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god, sorry for dropping 8500~ words on you, you deserve better  
> Two things:  
> One, Biddeford, Jonesport, the Great Wess Island Reserve - these are all real places, but the real life versions are nothing like the versions in this story. For the record, I'm not even sure there IS an East Abbot Street. So, for those of you who have been to Maine/live around there, I'm sorry for rearranging your state. I'll put it back the way I found it, promise.  
> Second, this chapter, and all the ones following it, begin to take a bit more of a loose interpretation of the prompts. If anything is unclear, feel free to ask - I'd love the chance to rant about this GIGANTIC MESS OF A STORY AAAARGH


	4. Myth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belief is a hard thing, especially in yourself. It's always easier to do something together, rather than alone.

Aster thinks he’s being ridiculous when the golden man standing atop the hill waves at him, and he raises his hand to wave back. All day, now, no one has seen him - no one save Jack, who has seen him since the beginning (Aster realises the possible meanings for that statement, and adds it to his very long list of things he wants to say to Jack.)

He has spent all day making the list of things he wants to say to Jack. He’s never realised how much he has to say until he can’t say it anymore - how much silence can bother him. Aster was never a wordy person: not as a child, not as a teenager, not as a struggling unknown painter and not as an internationally recognised artist. Words and him don’t get along.

Then he’d met Jack. Jack, whom he’d not even seen for long minutes as he struggled to free himself from boxes he’d been too proud to ask for help with in the first place, whom he’d cracked a joke at without thinking, who’d laughed without reservation. Who’d helped him to his feet and checked that he was alright, who’d known who he was and not become insufferable, who’d helped him put the boxes in order. Aster had heard his name and fumbled; he’d seen  _ Winter Mornings Come Spring  _ a week before it closed in Alice Springs, and never thought he’d meet the photographer himself. He’d lied about the firm having talked about him, because it was better than admitting that his heart had just stopped.

There had been a photograph that remains in Aster’s memory, all this time later; a cluster of  _ Claytonia virginica,  _ nestled white beneath the arch of a green ash’s root, the dark shade behind them making their faint pink streaks stand out starkly. Snow dusted the mossy root above, and the colour transition - white, green, black, white, with a spark of pink in the middle - had been heart stopping to him. The focus had been on the foremost bloom, none of that hyper-focus that drove the background into blurry obscurity in other photographer’s works, and it was so innocent, sitting beneath its little roof of living wood. Aster still thinks of it from time to time, the way each line had been so delicately limned by sunlight, when he sees Jack in movement.

He wants to tell Jack that, too - that one of the first things he’d said to him had been a lie. He feels like a lot of what he’s said to Jack has been a lie, from the way he would deny having been checking Jack’s ass (he does it at least twice as often as Jack suspects, and significantly more than he’s ever been caught), to the way he tells Jack every Saturday evening that he’s too sloshed to drive home (he’s never once managed to get properly drunk in Jack’s presence; he’s never wanted to dull the experience, to dim it in his memory.)

Jack is - like light in a dusty room, like the  _ Claytonia virginica’ _ s first blooms in spring. He’s heard more words out of Aster’s mouth in three years than anyone else has in the preceding thirty five. Aster can’t  _ not _ talk to Jack - words come pouring out of him, about everything and anything, opinions he’s never shared with anyone and ideas he’s only just had, and Jack talks  _ back,  _ offering opinions and ideas of his own, and it’s a conversation that started that day under the boxes and hasn’t stopped since.

Aster spent the first year waiting to run out of things to say. Then the second year. Then the third.

Now that he can’t say anything at all, it’s building up in him, like water behind a levee, and every moment that passes is another where he thinks of something he wants to say/should have said already, and it’s filling him up too full to give him space to breathe.

He still breathes, funnily enough. He doesn’t know if that’s just habit, or not, but when the glowing man atop the hill smiles at him (eye contact and everything) and glows somehow  _ brighter, _ Aster sucks in a silent, surprised breath.

He looks over to Jack, who’s looking at him in the same instant, a mutual  _ did that actually just happen? _ They walk the final distance up the hill, and Jack clears his throat nervously. His hand is small and pale in Aster’s, but steady, steadier than Aster’s ever could be.

‘Hi. Uh, I guess you were expecting us?’

Aster watches as the man of light - he longs, briefly and bizarrely, for his paints - nods in answer. A slow smile spreads over his face, lazy and content, and he looks at them both, eyes flicking from Jack’s face to Aster’s and back again, like he’s drinking in the sight of their faces.

Aster has no idea what the hell that’s supposed to be about, and as the silence stretches on, he begins to twitch; it’s too much like the silence that comes from his throat, now, too full and yet so empty of meaning. His hand in Jack’s is shaking.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ and Aster could kiss him for breaking the silence (it had been more tolerable in the car, only the two of them, when Jack’s hand in his said everything in Aster’s head so much more eloquently than his mouth ever could), ‘but, uh, after Tooth and Nick, I was sort of expecting a bit more… questioning? Some kind of third degree interrogation.’

The glowing man shakes his head, the light dappling with the movement, his expression unmoving. What’s strangest to Aster (and after the day he’s had, that’s saying something) is that this man looks so  _ glad _ to see them, so -  _ relieved, _ that’s the word Aster wants. Like everything has been going wrong, and at last something is going right.

Well. Aster knows that feeling.

He looks over at Jack, who shrugs back, visibly helpless.

‘I don’t know what to do.’

Aster looks back at the man, hoping he’ll give them some clue; instead, their gazes meet, and blackness descends over his vision. His hand tightens around Jack’s, and for a minute, there is  _ terror  _ in him - not after having come so far, he isn’t ready to go, he shouldn’t  _ have to go - _

Colour returns in great spray of light across his vision, and he hears Jack say, as if through thick glass, ‘What? What’s going on?’

Aster thinks he manages to signal that it’s okay, but he’s distracted by everything in his mind’s eye - and it has to be his mind’s eye, no way he could be seeing this in reality.

Before him unfolds two paths, one brightly lit, the other dim. For a moment, all he can see is the bright lights; towering clouds and singing thunder, trees taller than any human structure, flowers jewel bright and lovely.

He sees himself, and he is alone.

That jars Aster a moment, sends his eyes skittering to the left, to the dimmer path.

Here, there is a small house. The sky is overcast, weak sunlight filtering down. There are trees here, but not the behemoths to the right; flowers, the common colours of the world Aster knows, beautiful but not unearthly. And here, amidst the common flowers and the normal trees, in the grey light, Aster tends a garden. The image of himself seems unaware that he is being watched, focussed on his task; what draws Aster in, the true Aster, is that not ten feet away lounges Jack. He looks at ease, white hair soft in the light; his mouth is moving, and Aster watches his own shoulders shake as he laughs in response.

The vision is a question, Aster realises, and one with the easiest answer in the world.

He turns, just the tiniest bit, to the left - to the dimmer, truer vision, towards Jack (both in the vision, and in his body).

The lights fade from his sight, and he is again atop the little hill, Sandy (and that’s his name, Aster knows now, the same way he remembers street names and book titles from otherwise foggy dreams) giving him a soft, approving look.

Sandy turns to Jack, and Jack shouts a little in surprise, stumbles a bit. Aster just holds on, knowing Jack has to be seeing something similar from the way Jack’s eyes go wide, the blue irises so bright and beloved in Sandy’s light.

He expects Jack to have the same sort of question he’d been asked, and so is surprised when Jack opens his mouth.

‘Yes. Anything. Everything. He deserves that.’

Aster, not for the first time today, feels warm; mostly, he feels nothing. He feels Jack’s hand, and other things as he bumps into or interacts with them, but it’s all pressure - there’s no sense of temperature or texture, save obvious differences, such as between gravel and paper. But sometimes, he feels warm (each time Jack has said something that shows how devoted he is to this, to Aster, it grows. He hadn’t thought, before the past twenty-four hours, that he could feel more for Jack than he already did. He’d been so very wrong.)

‘It’s not about me,’ Jack continues after a moment, voice sure. ‘It would make me happy, but it’s not about me. It’s about him. It’s wrong, what happened, and I can fix it, so I  _ must _ fix it.’

Another pause; Aster feels so humbled, and all he can do is lace their fingers more tightly, hope that gets the message across.

Jack’s face changes, just a little, a stony look overcoming his natural good cheer, and Aster steps nearer, concerned. Is he alright? What did Sandy just say?

‘No,’ Jack says, sounding a bit derisive. ‘And you know that.’

Jack blinks a moment, the colour of his eyes fading down to their normal hue, and Aster watches him closely for a sign that he’s hurt, or upset. Jack looks back, and god, Aster knows that look, has seen it in a million little stolen snatches and (in the last day) so many direct gazes. Sitting on Tooth’s couch. Standing in Nick’s office. Every few seconds in the car, and now, so strong and and so vivid.

Aster swallows, and turns back to Sandy. Sandy smiles and gestures, and though it makes Aster’s stomach drop down to the vicinity of his knees, he lets go of Jack’s hand. Jack lets him go, even if his fingertips cling for a second to Aster’s skin, and Aster loves him for it.

Sandy tilts his head, and for a second, colours swim in Aster’s vision - white and lilac grey, blue like the ocean (like Jack’s eyes), green like the undersides of leaves (like Aster’s). A ringing yellow above. A brilliant, bruised blue grey below. Flowers and arrows, curls of frost on windowsills, knotted wood, what Aster imagines laughter might look like if he could see it resonating in his own breast.

Aster nods. Like before, there was only ever one answer to this question. He doesn’t hesitate in giving it.

The lights leave his vision, become the same gold colour of Sandy’s - everything - and the forest is alive with it. It pulls at something he cannot see nor understand (might never understand), and Aster knows this is why he still breathes, for this one moment in existence.

He breathes in, and the light pours into his mouth, and there is a space in his throat he hadn’t known was there that is filling up, a familiar weight. It’s spreading through his body, warmth and light, and he turns around, to where Jack is waiting, and he knows precisely what he wants to say in this moment.

‘Jack,’ he tries out, and the word feels right on his tongue, in his throat, it makes  _ noise _ in the world, ‘Jack, I love ye.’

Jack’s face crumples, the delicate control Aster had watched waver and bend but hold steady all day finally breaking. He drops to his knees, a shaky sound answering Aster, pale hands clutching at the dark fabric of his sweatshirt over his chest. Aster darts down, and he knows he’s going to go through Jack when he tries to grab him, but for a moment he  _ believes he won’t, _ and his arms are steady around Jack’s shoulders for a split second before fading through.

Jack is laughing, or sobbing, Aster can’t tell which as he sits back, disappointed that he still can’t hold him the way he deserves. Jack lifts his head, and his eyes are wet but his cheeks are clear.

‘I love you too,’ Jack gasps, and Aster has never felt so weightless in his whole life. ‘I love you, I love you -’

‘Shhh,’ Aster says as the laughing half of Jack’s sound begins to give way to the sobbing. ‘Shhh, me love, ye’re alright, I’m here -’

It takes a moment, but Jack calms. He doesn’t take his eyes off Aster once, as if  _ now _ he’s terrified Aster will disappear. 

‘I thought I’d never hear your voice again,’ he says at last, and his words are steadier. ‘I thought I’d never…’

Aster lifts his hand to Jack’s face, knowing he can touch that much, and Jack presses into his palm.

Jack gets to his feet, and pulls Aster after him. It should be ridiculous - Aster has at least a foot of height on him, if not more - and Jack’s knees are all muddy, the skinny jeans almost ruined. It doesn’t matter. It’s right.

‘Thank you,’ Jack says to Sandy. ‘Thank you, so much.’

Sandy smiles at them both, waves his hand. Light comes, bright as before, and pours into a little bag Sandy shakes from his sleeve. He floats it over, and it lands with a soft thumping noise in Jack’s hands. Jack tucks it in the pocket where Aster knows the box from Tooth and the egg from Nick are hiding, and Aster has no idea what’s in the bag, if it’s actually light or something else, but he’s nervous about it.

He looks to Sandy once more, and light is in his eyes; when he looks to his left, though, Jack is there with him. They’re seeing the same thing, at least.

Steel grey, shot through with chrome, dim green lights above. Cupboards, Aster thinks. Maybe. The sound of wheels, tinny and high pitched. A dim electric buzz.

He has no idea what it means, but he memorises it. Jack nods beside him, and the lights fade.

To Aster’s surprise, Sandy is standing there no longer. High above them, hidden by the drizzle, is a faint yellow glow, though.

‘Okay, I’m ready for today to end,’ Jack says beside him, and Aster laughs. The sound is almost startling, after a day of silence, and Jack looks a little stunned himself.

‘Let’s go home,’ Aster says, squeezing Jack’s hand.

Jack’s face does something complicated, and for a moment, Aster wonders if he overstepped.

Then Jack smiles, and it’s so honestly, earnestly happy, Aster can’t resist smiling back.

‘Yeah, let’s,’ he says, and then laughs a little. ‘Hope you can find the way back to the car.’

 

He can, and they’re on the road, and it’s quiet. Aster thought he would mind that, after the silence of today, but he doesn’t. He’s said the thing that most needed saying, after all; he can handle a little quiet.

Sometimes, he thinks he can feel Jack’s skin against his, palm to palm, but only if he’s not concentrating. The second he recognises it, the sensation is gone, and he’s forced to consign it to wishful thinking.

It’s an absolute downpour by the time they reach Biddeford again, and they all but sprint inside to the stairwell to Jack’s apartment, hand in hand still. Aster can’t feel the cold wetness like Jack can, but he dislikes the way the rain lays heavy on him, as if it was soaking his clothing instead of whatever it’s actually doing. The mechanics of his existence right now are imprecise and volatile; he’s choosing not to think on them too hard.

Jack opens the door to the apartment, shivering, and flicks on the lights. The clock on the wall near the door reads eleven thirty nine, but it feels later, like it’s three in the morning and all the world is silent.

It’s hard to think that it’s been less than a day since Aster sat on this couch last, and he stands awkwardly on the doormat. He realises he is dripping. He’s not thought about the logistics of his clothes getting wet, the green canvas jacket from the night before still sitting on his frame, and nervously, he takes it off, hanging it on one of the hooks beside Jack’s door. He half-expects it to disappear, but instead, it just hangs there.

Jack’s hand touches it, pale skin against the dark green, and jerks back. ‘It’s real,’ he says, wonderingly, then blushes a bit. ‘Sorry, I just - I didn’t think -’

‘I didn’t either,’ Aster admits. Jack’s blush has caught his eye, and he tries not to think about other logistical quandaries, about what is real and physical and what might not be.

‘Hold on, I need to go change,’ Jack says, still faintly pink, and dashes off before Aster can say anything - not that he would. He’s holding still, voice frozen in his throat, because of course, he’s pictured Jack naked. He’s a good-looking bloke, Aster’s feelings set aside, and it would take a far stronger man that Aster ever could be to ignore that. Jack’s  _ I love you _ s are ringing in his ears now, though, and there’s a faint rush of heat in Aster’s body that he can’t explain away as wishful thinking at the thought of Jack stripping only a room away, and he realises with some horror that he’s actually  _ hardening _ .

...Well, that at least answers some of the questions he’d been very carefully not thinking about, about whether or not this - ghost? - body still really functioned like his own. He takes a seat on the couch, and tries to think of anything else. He’s not very good at it.

Jack comes back in sweatpants and a white tee-shirt, carrying the items from his sweatshirt in his hands, and that does more to quell Aster’s stirring interest than anything Aster was trying on his own. He sits beside Aster on the couch, and sets them out.

A little gold and white puzzle box, shimmering with colours beneath the lights, made of hinges and panels and mysteries.

A glistening ice egg, a lovely blue green that casts a bright spot in the centre of its shadow, light focussing through its glassy curves.

A little pouch, dark violet in colour, bulging with its contents and glowing just the tiniest bit brighter than its surroundings.

Aster and Jack sit there and study them a moment. Jack’s hand creeps over, and Aster takes it, the motion familiar now through hours and hours of practice.

‘You’re going to laugh at me,’ Jack says at last, voice low, ‘but I’m kind of - scared. Of them, I mean.’

Aster knows what he means. It takes him a moment to remember that he can say so, now. ‘Me, too.’

‘I’m glad it’s not just me, then,’ Jack says, and squeezes Aster’s hand. Aster squeezes back. For a moment, he feels Jack’s fingers against his palm, chill against his skin’s warmth, and then it’s gone.

Jack is still.

‘Did you feel that?’ he says at last, voice drawing the words out to twice their usual length, as if to put off Aster’s answer.

Aster nods. ‘Yeah,’ he says, and tries not to think about how hoarse his voice sounds. ‘Ye’re - it feels - real.’

‘For just a second,’ Jack agrees, looking over at Aster. His blue eyes catch the light of the lamps just so, and it makes Aster’s breath catch - audibly so, from the subtle tremor that travels across Jack’s frame. ‘You’re warm. Then it’s gone.’

‘I don’t know why,’ Aster admits.

Jack looks away, then back. ‘I have an idea,’ he says, and there’s a determined tilt to his eyebrows. ‘Trust me?’

‘Always, Frostbite,’ Aster answers before he can consciously think about it, a little too fast and a little too breathless.

Jack smiles, and that’s good, that’s familiar and lovely, and Aster relaxes a smidge. ‘Close your eyes,’ he says, ‘and try to - believe, alright? I know it sounds dumb,’ he adds, looking nervous now, ‘but -’

‘It doesn’t,’ Aster interrupts. ‘Ye never do.’

Jack grins, bright and wry. ‘See, now I know you’re lying.’

Aster considers this. ‘Alright, ye only sound dumb when ye’re trying to tell me that double-espresso monstrosity is good for ye.’

Jack laughs. ‘It’s good for the  _ soul _ , Bun-bun. I never said it was good for the  _ body.’ _

‘And now  _ ye’re _ lying,’ Aster returns, ‘because I remember ye spouting some bulldust about how it ‘keeps yer ticker running’ and lemme tell ye, the only thing that it does for yer ticker is -’

Jack puts his hand on Aster’s mouth, and for a second, it’s cool skin and the last dregs of rainwater, and then it flickers back to nothing.

‘Close your eyes,’ Jack repeats, ‘and  _ believe.’ _

Aster does as he’s told.

Jack’s hand slides from his mouth to cup his chin, and instead of listening to what he knows, how he knows it’s supposed to feel (distant and unreal), he believes. He believes that Jack is touching  _ him,  _ not his ghost or whatever he is now. And like it had been waiting for him to pay attention, something connects inside him, and it’s Jack’s skin on his, a second hand rising to frame his face. He feels them both, the fingers spread over his skin.

Warm breath brushes against his mouth, and then Jack is kissing him.

Aster  _ believes,  _ with every part of himself, and so it is that he feels Jack’s lips, warm and curving against his own, his thinner nose nudging against Aster’s cheek, the soft vibration as he hums.

Jack pulls away, and Aster opens his eyes. For a split second, Jack’s hands waver on his cheeks, but Aster knows what this belief feels like now, and it steadies.

‘I thought so,’ Jack says, and his thumbs sweep across Aster’s cheekbones. ‘You can’t touch me because you  _ think _ you can’t. When you tried to hug me in the forest, you did, for just a second - and then you reminded yourself you couldn’t. You could hold my hand, but you didn’t think a - a ghost would be able to do more. So you couldn’t.’

Aster is wordless.

Jack’s hands fall still.

‘Sorry,’ he says, and begins to pull his hands away, a mortified expression on his face. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have -’

Aster reaches up and clamps Jack’s hands back in place, dark hands and paler palms curving over flushed wrists (turns out, when Jack’s really embarrassed, it’s a full-body blush). ‘Yes, ye should’ve,’ he says, and presses forward.

Jack meets him halfway, lips already parting, and within five seconds it is the most filthy, desperate kiss Aster’s ever taken part in. Jack’s tongue is scalding against his, sliding in and twining around and drawing Aster’s tongue into his own mouth. Their teeth click together, their hands move; Aster wonders distantly how he could have ever  _ not  _ believed in this, believed that dead or alive or someone in between Jack  _ wouldn’t _ affect him like this. Jack’s hands have slid up and dug into his hair, clutching desperately, and Aster has a death grip on his shoulders. He leans forward, further, and then Jack is falling back against the arm of the couch and Aster is clambering forward, straddling his hips with single-minded determination.

‘You’re dripping water all over me,’ Jack manages to gasp when Aster breaks away from his mouth and realises what has happened. ‘You’re still soaked.’

‘Good, more reason to take it off,’ he replies, and Jack groans under his breath.

‘That’s a terrible line.’

‘Did it work?’

‘You literally could have said anything and it would have worked,’ Jack answers, breathless. Aster’s hands have slid down, past Jack’s stomach, and caught at the hem of his shirt. It feels like fabric to his fingers, which should come as no surprise, but somehow does. Jack brushes his hands away. ‘Come on, take it off,’ he says, gesturing at Aster’s clothing as he strips the shirt off with stunning efficiency, given that he’s still lying under Aster and half-pinned to the couch arm. ‘You know and I know it’s coming off. Hurry up.’

‘Ye’ve got a lot of tickets on yerself,’ Aster replies, leaning back and taking off the brown button up he’d been wearing. It makes a satisfyingly wet sound against the floor.

‘You and the Aussie speak, I swear it’s a different language,’ Jack says, but his eyes are glued to Aster’s chest. His hands come up and land on him, and they’re not small, per se, but they stand out against his skin like stars against the backdrop of space. They feel a little chill, and trace lines against the muscles there. Aster’s nipples harden, and they sure as hell aren’t the only thing. ‘Christ, Aster, you’re a painter,’ he says, which seems a bit of a non sequitur until he adds, ‘you shouldn’t look like this. When do you even exercise?’

‘When I can,’ Aster replies, a little embarrassed by the attention.

‘You have tattoos?’ Jack continues, finding the dark ink - only a few shades darker than Aster’s skin. He swallows, and Aster watches his throat move. ‘You,’ Jack says, frowning up at him, ‘have been holding out on me, E. Aster Bunnymund.’

‘Me,’ Aster says, unable to help the incredulous sound in his voice. ‘Me? Ye, running around with yer eyes and yer cheekbones, yer wrists and collarbones and yer  _ arse,  _ Frostbite, yer thighs could have been pulled off a Greek statue and ye’re complaining about  _ me _ holding out?’

Jack goes so pink, it’s spilled all down his chest. ‘What?’

Aster dips down again, kisses Jack’s mouth, and pulls away. ‘Ye have the worst habit of wearing skinny jeans, ye bloody hipster.’

‘You wear these button ups all the time,’ Jack argues, still red, ‘and you roll up your sleeves like your forearms aren’t fucking porn on their own -’ he arches up and catches Aster’s mouth, the movement pressing their hips together, and Aster moans, because he can feel Jack through their pants and it’s warm and hard and he hasn’t felt anything all day except Jack’s hand on his, distant and warmthless, and good god, he could come like this, just like this -

‘Off, take off your pants,’ Jack demands, dropping back down to the couch, and Aster’s already flicking open the button, rising up onto his knees, Jack wriggling beneath him, shimmying the sweatpants down to the bottom of the couch. Aster freezes, because Jack’s not wearing anything underneath them, and the sight of him, bare and pale and flushed pink, is arresting.

‘So, uh,’ Jack says after a minute, turning steadily pinker, ‘I may have -  _ may have,  _ okay, this is definitely a might/might not situation - thought that, maybe, we would. Uh.’

‘Ye’re  _ gorgeous,’ _ Aster breathes, and Jack jerks. ‘Can I paint ye? Tell me I can paint ye, lie if ye have to, I don’t care -’

His pants and the briefs beneath are gone, stripped off him by his own trembling hands, and Jack makes a soft noise.

‘If you let me take pictures,’ Jack says, and thirty eight was too old for Aster to just be discovering that he might have an exhibitionism kink, god damn.

‘Anything ye’d like,’ Aster promises, and kisses him again. It’s still warm, still real, and Aster believes with everything he’s got in the way Jack’s hands grip his back, the way he spreads his legs between Aster’s, the way he rolls up into Aster’s first tentative brush against his cock with a quiet groan and the light sting of his nails into Aster’s skin.

His breath in Aster’s mouth is warm, and Aster’s fingers are against his skin when he glances down, his broad palm wide and catching them both up in the tides of their rolling hips. His hands, Jack’s skin, and he can  _ feel it,  _ and he isn’t going to last, not long at all, it’s like it’s the first time all over again -

‘Come on, Cottontail,’ Jack breathes, voice hushed, and when Aster looks back up, startled, Jack’s eyes are hazy and lidded. ‘Come on, I can’t take much more, you’re - I’ve waited for - forever, it feels like, don’t  _ tease  _ me like this -’

Aster’s hand tightens involuntarily, and the pressure must be exactly what Jack needs, because he leans his head back and sighs, a soft shushing sound. Aster can feel the way his cock twitches, the wet, slippery feeling of his come on his fingers.

Aster groans back, louder (he’d never though he’d be the louder of the two of them, nor that Jack would be the dirty talker) and follows in Jack’s footsteps.

They slump together on the couch, hard breathing, chests pressed together; Aster would worry that he was crushing Jack beneath his weight if Jack didn’t look so blissed out. He likes that he’s large enough to blanket Jack entirely, a brief but sharp sense of protective possessiveness in his chest, and he presses a kiss to one of Jack’s beautiful, damnable collarbones.

‘So I just had sex with a ghost,’ Jack says conversationally, once they’ve been breathing normally for a while (Aster has no idea how long), and Aster’s belief wavers for a moment, everything going distant before Aster snorts in laughter and snaps it back into place. He knows how, now. He’s not letting go until he has to. ‘You’re warm,’ Jack adds, his arms coming up to link around Aster’s waist, his legs shifting around and tangling with Aster’s.

‘Am I too heavy?’ Aster asks, bracing his weight on his forearms, prepared to get up; Jack rolls his eyes and presses against Aster’s back with his own arms.

‘Please, I can handle anything you throw at me,’ he says, and holds on tightly. ‘It’s good. It’s reminding me that you’re - here, really here.’

‘I’m not back yet,’ Aster says softly, though he gently rests his weight back against Jack.

‘I think Sandy was trying to help with that. With the last vision,’ Jack murmurs, clearly thinking aloud. ‘But I didn’t understand it.’

‘It was cold and metal,’ Aster muses, thinking in tandem. ‘That was the impression I got.’

‘Really?’ Jack replies, turning his head in an attempt to look at Aster. Aster, who has found a comfortable spot for his face in the crook of Jack’s neck, makes this an impossible task, and takes a bit of pleasure in the way this both annoys Jack (from the small hum in his throat) and presses Jack’s throat against his ear. He feels the vibration as Jack says, ‘I mostly got - like, I guess the colour I’d imagine antiseptic smells like. It was kind of gross.’

Aster frowns. Cold metal. Antiseptic. Green lights, if he thought about it. The sensation of cupboards.

It hits him, and the thought is so absurd, so horrifying, that Aster chokes.

‘What? What is it?’ Jack demands, his hands running instinctively over Aster’s back, quick, soothing strokes.

‘It’s a  _ morgue,’  _ Aster breathes, and Jack sucks in a surprised breath. Aster sits back a bit, weight on his forearms again, and he and Jack stare into each others’ eyes, noses brushing. ‘Jack,’ he says, and his voice comes out a little wobbly, ‘I think - I think we need to steal me body. From the hospital.’

‘Christ,’ Jack breathes back, but then he smiles. They’re too close for Aster to see it on his mouth, but it crinkles up the corners of his eyes. ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t think this would be easy, huh?’

Aster kisses him for that, and feels (that word will never be simple to him again) Jack kiss him back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There, a more normal length (phew!). Everything should be roughly around this length, I think, from here on out.


	5. Mischief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Between the flirting, the wordplay, and the panic, one could almost forget that they were here to steal a corpse.

‘I don’t know how we’re going to do this,’ Jack admits, parking the car in the hospital parking garage. His hands feel clammy on the steering wheel; the dashboard clock shines  _ 1:07  _ at him in a weak, sickly green. Aster, in the seat beside him, looks pale and washed out in the overhead lights, the warm brown of his skin bleached out. It’s a little disorienting.

Aster reaches over and places his hand on Jack’s shoulder, sliding it up and cupping Jack’s neck. It feels like skin and warmth and something - a little electric, like Jack’s touching something he’s not supposed to. He leans into the contact, and Aster smiles at him.

Jack pauses. That is not Aster’s normal self-assured smirk, nor the soft curve Jack’s grown used to in the past two hours, since it hadn’t left his face once. This looks - mischievous. Jack swallows, and pretends like he’s not a little turned on by it. They’re here to steal a corpse, it seems a little off-colour.

‘I think I do,’ Aster says, and though his skin is washed out and greyed by the lighting, his eyes are clear as ever. Jack swears they’ve lightened in the past day, gone spring-bright and electric. ‘But ye have to promise not to knock it before I explain it, yeah?’

‘Depends on what it is,’ Jack replies suspiciously. That doesn’t sound like he’s going to like it very much.

‘Ye let me go in alone.’

‘What?’ Jack cries, sitting straight up and almost dislodging Aster’s hand. ‘No way!’

‘No one can see me, Frostbite,’ Aster says soothingly, thumb sweeping across the hair at the nape of Jack’s neck. ‘They  _ can _ see ye.’

Jack scowls. ‘So? I can be sneaky.’

Aster rolls his eyes. ‘Yes, ye are the definition of subtle.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Ye know what it means,’ Aster says, and Jack is about to retort when Aster leans forward and kisses him, lips firm and warm, more of that electric feeling sliding into Jack’s mouth alongside his tongue.

Jack thinks that’s cheating, and would pull away to say so, if Aster didn’t have his fingers tangled in Jack’s hair. He wonders for a moment what someone would see if they looked into the car right now, and he laughs into Aster’s mouth.

Aster pulls away, eyebrow raised. ‘’If me kisses make ye laugh, I need more practice.’

Jack waggles his eyebrows. ‘I’m always down for more practice,’ he says, ‘but you’re a cheater, and you can’t distract me with that. You’re not going in alone.’

‘Jack,’ Aster says, face going serious. ‘If they catch ye, ye could end up arrested, or worse. And then where will we be? We’ve come too far now.’

‘You could use your invisible ghost powers to break me out, I bet.’

Aster snorts. ‘I’d rather it not get to that point, mate. Reckon I should use them now and avoid the blue altogether.’

Jack’s stomach clenches. ‘Okay, but just because you’re invisible doesn’t mean your body is,’ he points out. ‘How the hell are you going to get it out of the hospital?’

‘I have an idea, and I’m not telling ye because ye’ll laugh.’

‘Right now, I could use the laugh.’

‘Ye’ll laugh yerself into a coma.’

‘Oh, come on, you can’t say that and then  _ not _ tell me.’

‘Watch me, Frostbite.’

Jack grins, something going warm at the affectionate  _ Frostbite. _ ‘How long have you been saving up that petname, huh?’ he asks, since he’s never heard Aster say it before tonight, but it seems practiced on his tongue.

Aster smiles back. ‘Years.’

Jack melts, a little, which is annoying because  _ now is not the time.  _ ‘Okay, you know I could flirt with you forever, but seriously, we’re here to graverob. Let’s just get this over with.’ 

‘The romance is dead,’ Aster says, and Jack laughs, because when a pun is  _ that bad, _ there’s no other option. Aster looks pleased with himself, and steals another kiss. ‘Stay here. I’ve got a plan, and believe me, ye’ll prefer not to know.’

‘Tell me afterward,’ Jack demands, the thought of Aster leaving the car and going off without him tightening his stomach into anxious knots. ‘You have to, got it?’

Aster’s face softened. ‘I’m coming back, body or no.’

‘What if something happens?’ Jack whispers, because he doesn’t think he can handle the idea if it’s spoken any louder. ‘If you touch your body and - I don’t know, it’s like antimatter and matter touching, what if you disappear, what if it makes you -’

‘I’m coming back,’ Aster interrupts, determined frown like a deep etching in his brow. ‘I’m coming back, me love. I came back once, didn’t I?’ He cups Jack’s face; Jack hadn’t realised he’d started shaking. ‘More than most get.’

‘You’re just special,’ Jack replies weakly. ‘Not supposed to be dead, yet.’

‘And what will ye do when I  _ am _ supposed to be dead?’ Aster asks, deadly serious. ‘When me real time comes?’

‘You’re assuming I don’t go first,’ Jack jokes, and Aster’s fingers tighten on his skin, not enough to hurt, but enough to signal to Jack Aster’s panic at that thought. ‘Hey, hey!’ Jack says, and lifts his hands to cover Aster’s. ‘You’re seriously telling me you haven’t thought of that yet?’

‘How’d ye even know this was wrong before I could tell ye?’ Aster asks, voice soft and hoarse. ‘Ye turned to me, and promised to fix this. How did ye know?’

Jack’s a little thrown by this seeming non-sequitur, and pauses to think. ‘I don’t know,’ he says at last. ‘It was a feeling, in my gut and chest. Like knowing you were next to me. It was just - there. It’s like knowing it’s cold, or that the wind is blowing. There was something wrong, and there’s something I can do to fix it.’

Aster is silent a moment, then he leans in and kisses Jack again. It’s soft and brief. ‘Then trust me,’ he says, pulling away, ‘when I say I’m coming back. I can feel it.’ His mouth curves up in a grin, mischievous once more. ‘Ye’re not letting death keep me. I can’t do anything less.’

‘You can make anything a competition,’ Jack says, ignoring very firmly the way his body is responding to Aster’s electric touch and devious grin. He takes a deep breath. ‘Okay. Promise me you’re coming back.’

‘I promise I’m coming back,’ Aster says, solemnity touching his expression but not erasing it entirely. ‘I’ll bring back me body, too, with any luck.’

‘I think you’ve had the lion’s share of bad luck lately, so it should balance out,’ Jack says, and kisses him again. ‘For luck,’ he adds, and Aster grins.

‘And ye say I’m unlucky,’ he teases, and opens the car door, his hands leaving Jack’s skin tingling. He shuts the door, and walks away.

Jack swallows down the clawing panic, tells himself over and over that this won’t be his last sight of Aster, the back he’d clutched at desperately only hours before walking away and at last disappearing into the hospital lobby.

Not for the first time in the past few hours, he wonders if he’s made the right decision, in doing this. Not in what he’s trying to do for Aster - he knows in his bones that even if Aster really was  _ just _ his best friend (like those two words could have ever covered everything Aster was, romance aside) he’d still do this. There is something wrong in how this happened, something that ought to be corrected. Jack thinks it’s kind of like when you’re looking at a framed picture, and you can tell it’s a little tilted to the right. Not enough for most to notice, but enough for him. He’s just reaching out and straightening it up, is all.

And it’s not to say that he’s not glad he could tell Aster he loves him - and he’d never thought that word could feel so wonderful on his mouth, like a static charge - like Aster’s touch, just a little unearthly. He  _ is.  _ But now, like it was waiting for the acknowledgement, the confirmation that Jack is locked into this for better or worse, he feels like he’s drowning. Aster’s dead. Maybe not permanently, but he’s  _ dead. _ They’re  _ stealing his body from the hospital morgue. _

When he’d fantasised about the future, when they finally got around to this, he’d really pictured something a little more laidback.

He snorts, drums his fingers on the steering wheel, checks the clock. 1:18. Aster had left at 1:14. He’s not even been gone five minutes, and Jack feels like he’s unravelling.

God. Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Terrified out of your skull, waiting for the inevitable? He hadn’t felt this strung out when sitting and waiting for the news that Aster was dead. This is so much nervewracking.

Jack drops his head forward onto the steering wheel, closing his eyes. Why had he agreed to let Aster out of his sight? Without so much as a whisper of the actual plan, other than  _ I’m invisible and ye’re not? _ Is he crazy?

If it wasn’t for his memories of the past day, he’d think he is. If it wasn’t for Aster’s promise, he would have fallen apart.

As it is, he breathes in. Checks the clock. 1:24.

‘Okay, we have got to get our brain onto something else,’ he mutters to himself. ‘Come on - make yourself useful. What comes after this, in the insane event that he actually manages to get himself back here?’

Well, for one, they had to figure out what the hell they were doing with the body once they had it. Jack suddenly feels like maybe this wasn’t the best thought out plan.

‘This is what we get for making longterm plans during the afterglow,’ he mutters.

In his pocket - a different sweatshirt, he had a million of them, but this one was dark blue and soft on the inside, one he’d owned since Seattle, comfortably broken in - sits the three things they’ve found so far in their quest. They are heavy in disproportion to their size, weighing his soul down. He still has no idea what they’re supposed to do with them. What they even really are.

‘So, to recap,’ he says, eyes flicking to the clock (1:32, almost twenty minutes, was that right? Should Jack worry more than he already was?), ‘We’ve got a memory from a future that hasn’t happened yet, an ice egg, and a pouch of light.’ He breathes out hard. ‘Great. Great. What the fuck am I supposed to do next?’

1:38.

1:47.

He sucks in a deep breath. ‘He’s fine, Jack, he’s  _ fine,’  _ he says under his breath, desperate to believe it. ‘He’s fine, he’s coming back, he’s fine -’

The back door on the passenger side opens, and Jack shrieks.

‘Christ, Jack, bring the whole hospital down, yeah?’ Aster says, wrestling a massive black bag into the back. ‘A bit louder, for the folk in the back.’

‘You! Do not grow a fucking sense of humour!’ Jack snaps, heart hammering as he stares at the body bag. ‘How the fuck did you do that? Is that you? How did you even carry that, you weigh a ton -’

‘Thanks, love,’ Aster says dryly. ‘And just so ye know, I nicked a doctor’s keypass for the back elevators, and carried it. Dunno if I get a free ‘turn a thing invisible’ pass because it’s me own body, or if ye’ve just spent the entire day not being noticed. I passed a janitor and she didn’t even blink.’

Jack stares for a minute, eyes following Aster as he closes the back door and gets in the front. ‘...Are you fucking kidding me?’ he says, furious. ‘That was your super-secret plan?  _ Smuggle your own body out like it was two day old trash?!’ _

‘Well, it’s only a day old,’ Aster says thoughtfully, looking utterly nonplussed at Jack’s rage. ‘Though from how ye reacted when I took me shirt off, I’d not call it trash, exactly -’

Jack all but climbs over the centre console, grabbing Aster’s face and kissing him hard. The electric shock feeling is back, humming under the sensation of Aster’s skin, and Jack is so relieved, so glad Aster is back, fingers carding through the wiry grey hair and mouthing down to his jaw.

Aster’s hands slide under the sweatshirt, fingers rubbing gently against Jack’s spine like he’s memorising each vertebra. ‘Hey, it’s alright,’ he murmurs into Jack’s hair. ‘I’m here. I came back.’

‘Good, because you promised, and I’d hate to think you were a liar,’ Jack returns, and kisses down the side of Aster’s neck, licking the hard line of his trapezius. Aster takes a sharp breath at that, so Jack does it again, the static of touching Aster’s skin dancing up his tongue.

‘I sort of am,’ Aster breathes. Jack pauses. ‘Like when I tell ye I’m three sheets to the wind on Saturdays, so ye’ll let me stay over. Or when we met.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Jack says as he pulls back to look Aster in the eye.

‘I knew yer name because I saw yer gallery, not because the firm ever mentioned ye,’ Aster says, looking like he’s confessing some dark secret. ‘In Alice Springs.  _ Winter Mornings  _ -’

‘ _ Come Spring,’ _ Jack finishes, stunned. ‘But - you did say that, you’d said you’d -’ Jack is having trouble processing. ‘The firm didn’t mention me? You just - knew my name?’

‘Come on,’ Aster groaned, looking mortified, ‘was I really going to admit that I recognised yer name as soon as ye said it? I’ve still got prints I bought -’

Jack colours violently as Aster continues, ‘Course, I hid them one I became yer friend. Christ, can ye imagine how nutjob I would’ve looked?’

‘You… bought my prints.’

Aster’s looking away.

‘In Australia? Before we ever met?’

Slowly, Aster nods.

Jack takes a deep breath, sits back in the driver’s seat. ‘I went to your gallery at the Gagosian four times.’

Silence.

He chances a glance over at Aster, and tries not to die from embarrassment at the way Aster’s staring at him. ‘I, uh, didn’t make the opening, or we might have met,’ Jack mutters, ‘but I went. Four days in a row - I was there for a client, but I had finished early, and I figured, hey, I’m in New York for a few days anyway, might as well see the galleries. Only, I, uh, didn’t get to any of the other ones.’

‘I knew ye’d mentioned the gallery,’ Aster says, voice sounding strange, ‘but I didn’t know ye’d gone.’

‘I didn’t want to say anything,’ Jack admits. ‘You’d said - when we met - you just wanted to be Aster. And Aster was a cool guy, you know, I didn’t want to ruin it by looking like a dumbass and fangirling because your  _.bioclockwork _ series was life-changing, okay?’

‘Ye liked  _.bioclockwork?’ _ Aster asks, sounding surprised. ‘It got awful reviews.’

‘It was awesome, and that critic is an idiot,’ Jack snaps, mostly because that one guy at the  _ New Yorker  _ wouldn’t be able to tell good art from a pre-schooler’s finger paintings. ‘If they weren’t hundred-thousand dollar paintings, you would have found one in my apartment, let’s be real.’

Silence in the car again.

‘And we waited three years to say anything?’ Aster says at last, voice plaintive, and Jack can’t help laughing at that.

‘Yeah, we did,’ he chuckles, and reaches out. Aster’s hand is there, waiting for him. ‘So, what now?’ Jack says, and glances into his backseat. ‘We’ve got - uh, you. What should we do now?’

‘We should leave, before they realise I’m gone,’ Aster says, lacing their fingers together. ‘Do ye have the things?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay. We’ll need them, I think. Do ye remember that cove ye dragged me to last year?’

Jack blinks. ‘Yeah, of course. Why?’

‘Dunno, it seems appropriately dramatic.’

Jack laughs, again. ‘Really? That’s your criteria for this? Not how easy it’s going to be? You realise we’re going to have to hup your deadweight body down to the cove, right?’

‘Look,’ Aster says mock-seriously, ‘if ye had the chance to pick the spot ye’d be resurrected at, are ye telling me ye  _ wouldn’t _ pick the most dramatic place ye could think of?’

Jack acknowledges the excellent point with a stone-faced silence.

‘Ye’re not nearly as good at the straight face as ye think ye are, Frostbite. I’m embarrassed for ye.’

‘You love me anyway,’ Jack says, the sort of teasing thing that used to roll off his tongue so easily before, and he pauses, realising that it’s not a tease, anymore.

‘Yes, I do,’ Aster says fondly, looking like he understands the thoughts in Jack’s head (he probably does). ‘Now, come on. We’ve got to break the laws of the universe, me love.’

‘Rules were made to be broken,’ Jack quips, and shifts the car into reverse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As to why I chose to focus on Jack in this chapter rather than Aster, Aster's half of the story was pretty boring, here. I mean, he strolled in, picked his body up, and strolled out. Very uninteresting, not even any need to sneak around
> 
> Which, uh, says a lot about a story when the graverobbing is the least interesting part


	6. Marriage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ocean rises. Sometimes, it carries things away. Sometimes, it delivers them to shore.

Aster realises that no matter what happens next, he’s with Jack for life, when halfway through the drive to the cove he blurts out, ‘Oh, Christ, what are we going to say to people when I’m alive again?’ and Jack’s response is an immediate ‘Publicity stunt.’

Jack adds, swift and sure, ‘Turns out Australian crazy is more bugfuck crazy than the rest of us.’

Aster turns in his seat and stares at Jack.

‘I was thinking about that, actually, while you were playing graverobber,’ Jack continues, flashing Aster a grin before returning his attention to driving. ‘I’m really good at multitasking. Anxiety attack and planning for our future? Turns out I’m your man.’

He colours as soon as the words leave his mouth, and Aster grins, relief and amusement suffusing his entire being. ‘Ye really are,’ he says, squeezing Jack’s hand lovingly, and Jack coughs, staring resolutely at the road. ‘Will that really work? Won’t the hospital have me down as dead in their records?’

‘You’ll be walking, talking, and they won’t have a body,’ Jack points out. ‘I mean, you’re going to have conspiracy theories about you forever - I can’t wait to see them - but they won’t be able to say shit.’ He pauses. ‘We should, uh, talk to Ombric, though. He’s director of the firm, and I have no idea how to run a press conference.’

Aster laughs, lifts Jack’s hand and kisses his knuckles. ‘Ye’re brilliant,’ he says, and Jack goes even more red. ‘I’ll even let the double espresso thing go. All geniuses have their quirks.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Jack replies, but he’s got a death grip on Aster’s fingers, knuckles whiter than ever.

‘I love ye,’ Aster answers simply.

Jack smiles, looks over. ‘I love you, too.’

Aster feels like sunlight and warm windowsills at that, and Jack’s finger’s tighten impossibly further. ‘You feel like lightning,’ Jack whispers, eyes trained on the road but all of his attention on Aster.

They drive on.

The sky has paled when they arrive, from black to deep blue; dawn is an hour or so away, Aster judges as Jack pulls off to the side of the road.

‘Why did ye pick this cove last year?’ Aster asks as he gets out of the car. Jack follows, stretches; he’s been up for hours and hours at this point, eyes gaining the slight edge of mania Aster’s come to associate with oncoming deadlines, the brightness and sleeplessness like a new light in Jack’s irises. ‘It’s like almost any other along the coast,’ he adds, when Jack looks over. ‘I mean, I like it, but it’s a bit out of the ways, yeah?’

‘You chose it this time,’ Jack mumbles, looking a little pink. ‘I, uh, picked the Great Wess because it was a long drive away, and I - wanted a day. With you. To myself.’

Aster knows he must look like a sop, but good god, how much is a man meant to stand? Love makes idiots out of sages, and Aster definitely feels the fool as he gazes at Jack. Jack shuffles, huffs out a sigh.

‘Come on, don’t look at me like that.’

‘When we get home, I’ve got a sketchbook I need to show ye,’ Aster says, and carefully doesn’t add the ‘or three’ that really wants to come out. One should be more than enough to show how utterly gone he’s been.

Jack smiles, and it’s just a little bashful, a little shy. Aster’s pretty sure his heartbeat has to be echoing off the cliff walls below, it’s so loud. ‘Yeah?’ Jack asks. ‘Then, uh, maybe I’ve got an album to show you. Maybe.’

Aster shakes his head, grinning at the admission. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he says, and opens the back door.

He didn’t have to look at his body for more than a second before he’d nicked it, only opening the bag enough to check his own face; it had been scheduled for ferrying to a funeral home in the morning, judging by the paperwork on the nearby desk. The skin had been dull and waxy, eyes closed, and Aster hadn’t felt like he’d been looking at his own body. It wasn’t as heavy as he’d feared it would be, and still stiff. Thankfully, this makes it easier to carry.

He finds it easier to think of it as an ‘it’, not as himself. If he does, it gets too weird.

‘Hey, Jack,’ he says, picking up the body bag, ‘got a question for ye.’

‘What’s up?’ Jack asks, patting his sweatshirt pocket, where the items from Tooth, Nick, and Sandy are waiting.

‘Is it stranger, do ye reckon, that I’m carrying me own body, or is it that that’s not the weirdest thingo to happen to me in the past day?’ He tilts his head, adjusts his grip. ‘Never mind, it’s the weirdest thing, I’ve decided.’

Jack stares at him. ‘Cottontail, in the past day,’ he says slowly, ‘we’ve met a woman who ages backwards, a man who can create stuff from nothing, and another one who _glows and flies,_ and, I guess, makes dead people talk again. And _then_ you stole your own body back. And _now_ we’re going to try to resurrect you. I’m pretty sure there’s no one thing we can point at as the weirdest thing.’

‘No, I’m going to argue ye on that,’ Aster says, aiming himself and his ungainly load at the stairs down the cliff to the beach itself. ‘I’m pretty sure carrying me own corpse wins.’

‘I had sex with a ghost,’ Jack replies flatly. ‘If we’re competing here.’

Aster pauses. Thinks about it. ‘Aye, I’ll let ye win on that,’ he says at last, ‘but only because I like ye. It’s a symbolic victory, really.’

Jack snorts, and Aster grins.

They make their way down the stairs, onto the rocky beach that waits for them. It’s high tide, or near it, and much of the beach is lost beneath grey-green waves, speckled with weeds. Above them, the gulls call sleepily, answered by the plovers and snipes, but it’s a quiet cacophony, hushed in the early light of the unborn morning.

Jack leads the way, footsteps sure and practised. Last time they were here, they’d found an overhang of cliff walls ringing a pristine circle of sand. It was just as stunning in the dim grey light as it was in full sun (a rare day that had been, in autumnal Maine), and Aster’s breath catches a little. This was right, he feels. He knows it in every spark and shift of his being.

‘You made the right choice,’ Jack echoes aloud, looking at Aster. ‘This is where we’re supposed to be.’

‘Help me get me body on the sand,’ Aster says, and Jack nods, determinedly. They unzip the bag, and the thick scent of brine and decomposing weeds becomes a little sharper with the pungence of antiseptic, the bitter undertone of dead meat. Aster tries not to think about it.

His body is naked, which he’s not sure is normal, but then, his whole knowledge of how bodies are handled comes from shitty police procedurals. Neatly stitched closed, a y-incision splits his torso, and Aster frowns.

‘Do ye suppose everything’s still in there?’ he says, trying to distract himself. ‘Don’t think I ever checked the organ donor box.’

‘While normally I’d be like  _ what the fuck Aster, _ since people need those,’ Jack replies in the same light tone, ‘I’m just going to be glad you didn’t, because it would suck to bring you back only to find out they already stuck your heart in some dude out in Kansas.’

‘It’s not like I didn’t mean to,’ Aster protests. ‘It just slipped me mind.’

‘Again: a good thing, probably.’

‘Do ye think they would have nicked anything?’

‘What, like you did with the whole enchilada?’

Aster laughs, and Jack looks very pleased with himself. It’s easier to deal with when he’s laughing, and he’s so, so grateful Jack is here.

‘It’ll be a cool scar, at least,’ Jack offers, and that sets Aster off again.

After a minute, they set the body supine in the sand, feet pointed east, towards the water. Aster has no idea if it’s inching higher or if that’s his imagination.

‘Ready?’ Jack asks, and Aster nods, then holds up a hand.

‘One second, love.’

He reaches for Jack’s hand again, and Jack steps nearer; in the span of a second, they’re clinging together, embracing so tightly that Aster would fear for his ribs if they weren’t laying on the sand.

‘I’m scared,’ Aster admits, whispered into Jack’s hair.

‘Me, too,’ Jack whispers back, face buried in Aster’s neck. ‘Of course we are. This is insane.’

‘I love ye. Even if - even if this doesn’t work, if -’

‘It will, it  _ will,  _ don’t even say that -’

‘Frostbite -’

‘Stop it, Bun-bun.’

Jack’s mouth is as warm as the wind off the sea is cold, tongue like steam, scalding and everywhere at once. Aster just accepts the onslaught, meets it with cradling hands and gasps of air when Jack lets him breathe.

‘I love you too much,’ Jack pants, breaking away at last, though the distance he puts between their mouths is less than a few centimetres. ‘Okay? I love you too much to let this not work. This is so fucked up, it should never have happened, and  _ I’m going to fix it.’ _

Aster is transfixed by the sight of Jack’s eyes, sparking and  _ glowing,  _ something unearthly and wholly right in the blue, blue irises.

‘I love ye,’ Aster breathes, and Jack’s gaze softens, though it does not dim.

‘I love you,’ he returns. ‘Now, go lay down, and let me fix this. I think I know what to do.’

Aster doesn’t question it. It’s in the air all around them, weighty as any storm, full and crackling as a summer thunderhead. Of course Jack knows what to do; they’ve known all along.

They break apart, and Aster lays down on the sand, beside his own body. He feels a distant, detached affection for it, strangely enough; it’s his, his alone, and soon he’ll have it back entirely. Maybe not so strange, after all.

Jack takes a seat at the body’s head, lifting it gently and placing it in his cross-legged lap. He reaches over, past the body, and trails his fingers lovingly over Aster’s brow. Aster knows it will be the last time Jack touches this part of him. He cherishes it.

Jack reaches into his pocket, and withdraws the puzzle box from Tooth. Like he’s known how the entire time, his hands fly over the small cylinder, turning the rings of gold, depressing tiny panels in a seemingly random order. With a click, it opens, and inside is a lilac liquid, gleaming pearlescent where the light hits it.

With utmost care, Jack pours it onto the body’s forehead; on contact, it disappears, as if pouring into a receptacle. Aster watches, fascinated, and breathes in harshly when his head starts to swim. It feels like being drunk, and he blinks rapidly, trying to clear the effect from his sight.

He misses the precise second where Jack pulled out the ice egg, but he sees the way Jack takes a deep breath, places it on the body’s bare chest, and crushes it between the sternum and the heel of his own hand. Aster shivers, looking up to the sky as the trembling sweeps up and down his whole frame, and feels the ocean begin to lick at four heels, the sharp edges of egg shells and the thick canvas of his own jacket, his head supported off the cold sand and granules in his hair, the sky unobstructed and the inside of his own eyelids.

He closes his eyes and tries not to panic as he feels/hears Jack pull something else from his pocket, the shifting of his body/the whisper of cord on fabric as he pulls the pouch from Sandy open.

Aster feels dust run over his closed eyes, bright and orange through the screen of his eyelids, into his nose, into his mouth. A voice is speaking, a familiar one, ageless and genderless and silent and loud.

_ Do you understand what you are asking? _

‘I do,’ Jack answers without hesitation.

_ Do you know the cost? _

‘I don’t care.’

_ You take half his death on your shoulders. _

Aster would flinch if he could move, but Jack’s voice is undeterred. ‘I’d give half my life over. You think half his death means shit to me?’

_ One half his death, one half your life,  _ the voice muses.  _ Is that enough? _

Jack’s voice sounds strained as he replies. ‘I’d give the whole life. This is wrong. It shouldn’t have happened this way.’

_ People die every day. _

‘Don’t give me that shit,’ Jack scoffs. ‘Or are you going to tell me you’re not the thing Aster heard when he was dead?’

Silence for a moment.

_ As clever as I’d hoped. _

‘Look, I have been tested all over the fucking place today,’ Jack snaps, and Aster’s cheering him on with everything he has. ‘I don’t know how many times I have to say it. Yes, it would make me happy to have him back.’ Jack’s voice breaks. ‘If he goes, I go with him. Doesn’t matter if I’m still breathing, okay, some part of me would be dead, too. Would I keep living? Yeah. Would I live to be a ripe old age? Probably. Would I fall in love again? Maybe, I don’t know. Only person I know who knows the future didn’t seem keen to share. If he’s gone, though, I’d never be the same person. If I don’t get him back, then two people were murdered night before last.’

Jack takes a deep breath. ‘But this isn’t about me. It’s about Aster. It’s about the fact that it wasn’t time for him to go, and that’s not just - just my  _ grief _ speaking. He came back to me,  _ you sent him back to me.  _ This is wrong. There’s something wrong in this universe, if he’s gone now. And it’s small, right now, but it would grow and grow, you know it, until everything is wrong. And for some reason, you or him, you picked me to fix it. So are you going to let me fucking fix it, or do you have another multiple choice question?’

The voice is silent a moment.  _ Multiple choice? _

‘Everyone thinks there’s a few right answers,’ Jack sighs, audibly annoyed. ‘But there’s only one, and if you know the question, you know which one it is, and all of the other ones look stupid. Are you done being an asshole?’

_ You understand what you are paying? _

‘No, you understand something. I  _ don’t care  _ what I’m paying. If I go in his place, if that’s what you’re implying, and it’s my time to go, then fine. But if it’s not, then we’re going to end up right back here, and I’m not going to be nearly so polite a second time.’

Aster wants to laugh, desperately, but for some reason can’t draw in breath. The tide feels like it’s up to his chest, cold as a winter’s night. It’s heavy, and laps at his skin.

_ One half of his death goes to you. One half of your life goes to him. Neither of you will hold the whole of a piece, but rather share what you keep. Do you accept? _

‘A half life with him is better than a full life without. Another year, another month, is better than nothing. I accept.’

_ One last time, for clarity’s sake. Do you, Jackson Overland Frost, accept Evergreen Aster Bunnymund’s death, and offer your life? _

‘Evergreen, huh? I’m going to tease you forever, Cottontail. I accept. I do. When do I get to make my vows, huh? Do I get a ring? Is there a reception?’

_ And do you, Evergreen Aster Bunnymund, accept the gift of Jackson Overland Frost’s life, and share the burden of your death? _

Aster can neither speak nor move, but he answers the best way he can - he takes every shred of love in him, of respect for Jack’s sacrifice and sorrow that he must make it, of pride that he’s strong enough to do so and humility that he believes Aster is worth it, and shoves the ball of emotion in the voice’s direction.

_ Very well,  _ the voice says, and for the first time, Aster thinks he might hear some inkling of identity to it - far off, pale and distant, but the sensation of an old, doting man.  _ Bound to and be bound by. You have remembered what has not yet happened, imagined what does not exist, gained a voice, given a heart, done the impossible. It is my great, great pleasure, my boys, to give you this. _

The water is over Aster’s head, freezing, and he splutters at it, flailing a bit and coughing up what has managed to creep into his mouth and nose. The water draws away, and does not reach as high a second time. High tide has passed.

The surf tugs at his body as it pulls away, and leaves him shivering, the sand smooth and sticking to him. There are hands as cool as sea foam keeping him in place, tight on his shoulders, and they help him sit up.

‘Aster?’

Jack’s voice is hesitant, and Aster opens his eyes.

Jack is soaked up to the midriff, having been sitting in the water, and he looks - nervous, even lit as he is by the gold sun just peeking above the horizon.

‘I’m -’ Aster manages to say before the waves strike them again. It shoves their bodies together, Aster too weak to resist the push, but Jack is there to catch him, arms closing around his body - his  _ body,  _ he’s  _ back. _

The water leaves them again, and Aster shivers hard. ‘Crikey, that’s cold,’ he complains. ‘Can we get out of the water?’

‘Too bad your clothes didn’t come back,’ Jack says, but there’s such a tone of relief to his voice that it takes Aster a minute to realise what he said.

‘Shite, are ye serious?’ Aster says, but as Jack helps him to his feet, it’s blatantly obvious that it’s true. Aster looks down at his own body and frowns; it’s his, certainly, but the y-incision scar looks years old, and his tattoos - ‘Why are they grey?’ he asks, bewildered as he runs a hand over the stark ink, pale against his brown skin.

‘That’s your question,’ Jack says, looking bemused. ‘Out of all of this, that’s your question. Why did my tattoos change colour.’

‘No, I asked if we could get out of the water first,’ Aster answers, and Jack begins to laugh, helplessly and uproariously, nearly toppling into the water in question.

‘I’ve got a blanket in the car, at least,’ Jack gasps out at last, and reaches out. Aster, naked as the day he was born (though, he supposes he has two of those, now), reaches back, and takes the offered hand.

It’s warm, and feels like skin. It’s real.

‘Come on, before you freeze to death,’ Jack says, then pauses.

It’s Aster who laughs first, and long after they’ve gone, the sound is still echoing off the cliff walls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more to go! (and no one is surprised by how this ends, because damn am I predictable)


	7. Miscellaneous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bric-a-brac of aftermath.

It is a madhouse.

Turns out, an internationally renowned artist getting murdered in a robbery gone wrong is not, in fact, something that can be waved off with ‘publicity stunt’, though Jack gives himself points for the thought.

Frankly, thank god for Ombric, who is just the right mix of practical and batshit insane to listen to them. Not that Jack had intended to share the whole tale. But Ombric’s got this face, right, this face that says  _ I know exactly what you’re not saying so you might as well tell me anyway,  _ and honestly, Jack’s glad he’s got it out of his system, or who knows what would have happened twenty years down the road.

Ombric takes charge like he wasn’t just told the most bizarre story he’s ever heard in his life, and Jack just lets him. He figures he’s done enough, he’s allowed to let someone else take charge. He and Aster sleep on one of the office couches for sixteen hours straight after the Skype call. They wake up to Ombric sitting in the office, calmly talking on the phone to somebody they can hear shouting through the earpiece, and Jack’s just relieved it’s not his job to handle the screaming.

Aster’s watching him, blinking blearily from where he’d pillowed his head on Jack’s chest, and then his mouth curls into a soft smile. ‘Morning, Frostbite,’ he murmurs, voice low and deep.

Jack could kiss him.

(He does. Many times.)

It takes a week for the hubbub to die down. Biddeford has probably never seen so many news crews, or if it has, they’ve never been so unsatisfied. The official story is ‘E. Aster Bunnymund was shot, there was a mix up with the hospital records, he signed himself out of medical and is recuperating at home with his partner. He is not pressing charges against the robber, and would prefer to be left to his recovery.’

No one gets an interview, or a quote, or even a candid shot. Aster’s listed place of residence looks empty, and those enterprising few who dig up the identity of Aster’s partner find his apartment shuttered and empty, as well. (Jack still feels like he’s lit up from the inside whenever he sees the line ‘Bunnymund’s partner’ in the news. Aster is bemused by this. When Jack asks why, Aster shrugs and says ‘Ye’ve been me partner for a long time, Jack, I’m not sure why it’s such a surprise.’)

(He gets kissed for that, too.)

They, on Ombric’s advice, have rented a seaside cabin along the long stretch of 187, and disappeared from the public eye the same day the news initially broke. The owner of the cabin lives in California, and is quite happy to remain silent on who’s renting her property so long as she’s getting paid. She’s an eighty year old chainsmoker, and she is wreathed in smoke through the computer screen they’re Skyping through. ‘Look, buddy,’ she says when Jack brings up their names. ‘If you can pay and you want your privacy, I don’t care if you’re the Pope and the President trying to get away for a private weekend of canoodling.’

Jack decides he likes her.

 

They’re there for less than a day before Jack breaks.

In his defence, Aster’s  _ alive.  _ Which Jack is still trying to wrap his head around, that Aster had been dead, had been a ghost, is now alive. He’s pretty sure he’d need a therapist for this, if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d get psych-warded so fast it would make his head spin.

Aster is alive, and loves him, and so maybe the phrase ‘less than a day’ isn’t as accurate as ‘as soon as they got through the goddamn door’.

Jack gives him until he’s dropped his bag on the floor, stretched (of  _ course  _ his button-up shirt rides up, it’s probably on fucking  _ purpose),  _ and turned around to start saying ‘Is that everything from out of the car?’ before Jack’s upon him.

Thank god Aster’s a quick study, really, Jack thinks as he licks Aster’s mouth open. He’s dragged Aster down to his level, but now he’s been backed up into the door, and he’s pretty sure it's the only thing keeping him upright at this point, because  _ wow _ can Aster kiss. Jack hadn’t ever really thought Aster would be loud, and he isn’t, but he’s much more vocal than Jack had anticipated, hums and sighs and outright groans when Jack tugs on his bottom lip with his teeth. His hands are big and fit like they were made to hold Jack by the waist, his shoulders broad and the perfect shape to hold onto, and Jack was ready to go before they’d even opened the door, much less now that Aster has him pinned to the damn thing.

‘Aster,’ he breathes when his mouth is free, Aster having ducked down even further and mouthing at his neck. He sucks in a deep breath when so, so gently, Aster nips at the juncture of throat and shoulder.

‘Ye realise we haven’t done this since - before,’ Aster says, his voice rough, vibrating into Jack’s skin. ‘I didn’t want - ye seemed so nervous, me love.’

‘Nervous?’ Jack manages, the word slowed by the drag of Aster’s tongue over the nip. ‘ _ Nervous?  _ Aster, I’ve been trying to give you space, get used to your body again -’

‘I’d prefer to get used to it with yer help,’ Aster says, lifting his head to look straight in Jack’s eyes, dragging him closer until they’re hip to hip and Jack can  _ feel  _ how much Aster would have preferred that. ‘Don’t tell me we’ve not been rooting around because ye thought  _ I  _ wouldn’t want to.’

‘You thought  _ I _ wouldn’t want to!’ Jack points out, in what he intends to be a reasonable tone, but might have gone a little high and airy when Aster slides his knee between Jack’s thighs. Jack gives up all pretenses of reasonability and just rocks into the welcome pressure, mindless - for the one second Aster gives it to him before withdrawing. He refuses to believe the soft whine he hears came from his own throat.

‘This place has to have a bed,’ Aster says, casting a glance around.

‘Why? I’m good where we are,’ Jack replies, and means it. Aster looks a little sceptical, so Jack relaxes back against the door, none-too-subtly parting his legs as he goes.  _ That _ gets Aster’s attention.

‘While that is tempting,’ Aster says, and from the way his throat bobs as he swallows, Jack believes him, ‘ye’re not going to be happy with that against yer back, if I have me way.’

Oh, Jack likes the sound of that. ‘Really,’ he says, and tilts his head back, baring his throat, the red mark he can feel that he  _ knows _ is going to be there for days. ‘Because the bed is over there,’ he gestures vaguely off to the left, it’s a small cabin, there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’s right, ‘and I think it’s a little too far for my tastes -’

Jack doesn’t bother to disguise his squeak of surprise as anything else when Aster leans in and scoops him up, broad hands lifting his weight easily. Jack has no choice but to wrap his legs around Aster’s waist, cling to his neck, and he would have way more complaints about this if it didn’t put his hard-on (through his one hundred percent normal perfectly acceptable skinny jeans) against Aster’s.

‘Believe ye me,’ Aster says, not even sounding winded (the  _ jerk), _ ‘Ye’ll want the bed.’

‘Are you sure  _ you _ won’t?’ Jack challenges, leaning back in Aster’s hold, rolling his hips forward in emphasis. At this point it’s all moot, because he doesn’t much care what happens in that bed, so long as it  _ happens already,  _ but he never could just let Aster do whatever he wants.

‘I will,’ Aster replies, gaze unwavering, like that was a guarantee. ‘But for now - I want ye on the bed, I want ye out of these ridiculous jeans, and frankly, if we could both get off, that’d be ace.’

Jack laughs at that, because of fucking  _ course _ this is how it’s going to go, it’s  _ them,  _ and Aster kisses the laughter out of his mouth, only stumbling a little as he carries him in the direction Jack had gestured in. It is, of course, the wrong direction, which annoys Aster to no end and sets Jack to laughing again.

In retaliation, Aster drops him with no warning onto the bed that he  _ does _ find, though the effect is ruined by the way Jack refuses to let go and just drags Aster down with him.

‘Ye are the most difficult man alive,’ Aster sputters, sprawled out over Jack and looking deeply flustered. Jack loves it, kisses his nose, the corner of his jaw, anywhere he can reach.

‘You,’ Jack says against Aster’s dark skin, already beginning to unbutton the red button up that’s been torturing him all the way up 187, ‘are the biggest hypocrite. I had to become a - fuck, what’s the word, the video game thing where you summon dead people -’

‘Are ye fucking kidding me -’

‘A necromancer, yeah, that’s it. I had to become a goddamn necromancer just to get your pants off, okay, you’re not allowed to call me difficult -’

Aster cuts him off with his mouth, tipping his chin back up with one hand and hitching Jack’s leg up over his hip, grinding their cocks together, and Jack’s breathing stops.

He feels Aster tugging at his shirt insistently, but he’s determined to get Aster’s off first, and so the shirt ends up crumpled under his armpits and Aster huffs frustratedly. ‘See,’ Jack pants, attacking the tiny buttons more freely when Aster leans away, ‘you went and called me difficult when I wasn’t. Now I’ve got to show you difficult.’

Aster rolls his eyes, but shrugs off his shirt when Jack frees the last button from its hellhole. And Aster’s not what anyone would call a bodybuilder (and frankly, muscles were never a big thing with Jack until now, anyway), but he’s definitely fit, skin smooth save for the darker, pebbled line of the y-incision scar. Jack leans up and kisses the central point, right at the ‘v’ of one of the now blue-grey tattoos, and Aster sighs softly. It’s a good noise, and is repeated, louder, when Jack runs his tongue over the skin.

‘Christ, Jack, will ye let me get ye naked?’ Aster asks, sounding a little desperate.

‘Why, what’s in it for me?’

Aster cups him through his jeans, fingers a stark contrast to the faded denim, and Jack’s well of words dries right up, along with his mouth. ‘Maybe ye can handle more teasing,’ Aster murmurs, gently squeezing and releasing, coaxing Jack’s hips into helpless movement, ‘but I can’t. I’ve wanted ye too long, me love. Unless ye like waiting?’

He withdrew his hand right when Jack was going to buck up into it again, and the noise that leaves Jack’s throat can only be called a growl. He pulls his own shirt off before Aster can reach it, and says as he reaches for his zipper, ‘Okay, fine, your point is made,  _ take off your clothes.’ _

‘Thank ye,’ Aster says, falsely polite, and Jack would swat him for it, but he’s trying to shove the jeans off his legs without dislodging Aster from between them.

Aster stands up to shimmy off his own, rendering Jack’s efforts pointless, and for a moment, the haze lifts. ‘Oh, hold on, we need -’

‘I’ve got it,’ Aster says, and unearths a condom and a little clear tube from his pocket.

‘Read my mind,’ Jack says, relieved, and kicked his pants off at last. ‘I don’t think I can remember where I stuffed them in my bag.’

‘Flatterer,’ Aster replies, and Jack laughs.

Aster tosses the condom and lube onto the bed, up near the headboard, and stalks forward, coming to stand between Jack’s legs where he’s sitting at the edge of the bed. His cock is full and heavy, and his hips twitch when Jack palms it, his hand falling to land on Jack’s shoulder.

‘What do you want?’ Jack asks, fingers curled loosely around Aster’s length. He drops most of the humour from his voice; this is important, he knows,and he doesn’t want to cheapen it by cracking a joke. ‘Because seriously, I’m game for whatever if you want, but you’ve gotta tell me what that is.’

Aster’s breath is unsteady. ‘Christ, Jack,’ he says hoarsely. ‘Don’t ask a man that when ye’re holding his cock, yeah?’

‘What do you want?’ Jack replies in lieu of a direct answer; he strokes across the head of Aster’s cock, catching the soft skin and pushing it back a little, baring it to the air. ‘Aster.’

Aster’s visibly struggling to string words together, and Jack’s so enthralled at it, the sight of this tall, immovable wall of a human being so affected by Jack. A human being who fought death to a standstill to stay beside him, and then let Jack lead the way back.

‘Ye, on top of me,’ Aster says at last, words hushed like he doesn’t dare say them louder. ‘Riding me cock like ye’re dying for it. That’s what I want.’

Jack can’t help the soft moan, the way his hips shift in answer to that. Now that the image is in his head, he can’t get it out, and he wants it so badly it’s making his fingers trembling.

‘You got it, Cottontail,’ he says, and Aster grins at the name. ‘Get on the bed, come on, get moving -’

‘Ye’re so bossy,’ Aster complains, but does as he’s told, sprawling out on the bed with a lazy move that makes the air seize in Jack’s lungs. Jack wants, suddenly, to dig his camera out of his bag, to capture this moment in a thousand snapshots, but for the first time in his life, he’s not sure a photograph could ever do it justice. He thinks, for a moment, that he’s glad he’s not a writer; if a picture’s worth a thousand words, he’d never be able to write enough words to describe this.

He scoops up the condom and the lube up from where Aster tossed them, and crawls over, slinging one leg over Aster’s thighs. Their cocks brush, and it takes a lot for Jack not to just lean forward, rub their groins together until they’re both gasping, sweaty, come-streaked messes. Next time, he promises himself, or the time after, maybe, because next time he’s pretty sure he wants to fuck Aster into the mattress, but hey, they have a lot of times to go.

Aster’s hands land on Jack’s thighs, and Jack takes a second to admire the contrast, deep brown and angular grey against his own pale skin. ‘Let me,’ he says, voice so deep it seems to reverberate through his palms and into Jack’s bones. ‘Let me get ye ready, let me touch ye, please.’

‘Like I would say no,’ Jack replies, but he’s touched, strangely enough. He passes Aster the tube of lube, and adds, ‘How do you want to - do you want me to turn around or -’

‘Nah, come here,’ he says, and his fingers curl around Jack’s thighs, urging him higher up until he’s straddling Aster’s waist instead of his thighs. Jack hears the snap of the lube cap, Aster’s breathing, the wet sound of Aster slicking his fingers; for a long moment, Jack is a little overwhelmed, too in the moment, the sounds and the light and the knowledge that  _ this is happening, this is real  _ too much for him.

Aster’s finger circles his entrance, gentle and probing, and it breaks the tension in Jack’s body. His hands come to rest on Aster’s chest, pale fingers splayed over the dark brown, like stars, like  _ hands.  _ Jack feels it slide inside, and it’s good, it’s so good his breath hitches. Aster’s not touching anything important yet, but the knowledge that it’s Aster’s hand holding him open, entering him, is almost better.

‘Good,’ Aster’s encouraging softly, voice pitched forward, his eyes ( _ so green, _ Jack thinks,  _ they’re brighter since he’s been back)  _ trained on Jack’s face. He’s watching like he can’t get enough. ‘How slow do ye want me to go?’

Jack breathes out shakily, and doesn’t pretend it isn’t a moan. ‘Not too slow,’ he says, because he’s not sure he’ll last if Aster takes his time, and being almost-thirty means that he’s not going to be back online for a little while. No matter how much he suddenly misses the teenage refractory period. Aster’s finger withdraws and slides back inside, deeper now. Jack’s hips have a mind of their own and rock back on the intrusion, and Jack feels the muscles of Aster’s abdomen tighten as  _ his _ hips jerk. ‘Yeah, not slow,’ Jack says, though it might be a little closer to a babble, ‘not slow, don’t think I can handle slow -’

He watches Aster’s throat bob, and he nods. ‘Just - say if I -’

‘You’re not going to hurt me, god,’ Jack says, and though the angle is kind of weird, he bends down and kisses Aster’s mouth. ‘Come on,’ he says, curling his body down a little farther, pressing more against Aster’s finger, ‘I thought you didn’t like waiting?’

The finger withdraws, returns with a friend, and like he’s been practising, Aster finds Jack’s prostate with a clever curl that has Jack gasping. Two becomes three, and the stretch is good, Jack’s not even sure someone could call it painful, just more open than he’s been in a while (and for the past three years it’s just been his own fingers, thin compared to Aster’s, and oh  _ god _ Aster’s fingers are finally inside him, fucking  _ finally). _

‘Okay, okay, that’s enough,’ Jack mumbles, and Aster’s hands slide away, leaving Jack empty behind them and grasping for the condom still off to the side. It takes a try or two to get it onto Aster’s cock (in Jack’s defence, his hands are a little unsteady, and it’s been a long time since he was with someone who had a foreskin), but soon it’s rolled into place, and Jack has it pressed against his entrance, thighs trembling a bit as he positions himself.

‘Any time, love,’ Aster says, voice throaty, and Jack grins despite himself.

‘Seriously, Bun-bun, we have  _ got _ to work on your patience,’ he says as levelly as he can, and begins to work himself down just when Aster opens his mouth to snark back.

It’s everything Jack has been wanting for ages, wide and thick and warm and  _ real,  _ and he doesn’t know the word for the sound he makes, but Aster seems to like it a lot, from the way his hands clamp onto Jack’s hips with a desperation that is going to leave red marks on the skin.

It’s both forever and the span of a few seconds until Jack bottoms out, flat against Aster’s hips, and Aster’s breathing is uneven, his body twitching.

‘Like I’m dying, huh?’ Jack quips, bracing his hands on either side of Aster’s torso. ‘That’s what you wanted?’

He’s sort of expecting a pithy response, but Aster just slides his hands up Jack’s back, fingers dragging against the skin, and whispers, ‘ _ Please,  _ Jack.’

Jack jolts at that, and the movement is like lightning, their skin contact like static, and he’s done teasing. Even he can’t keep it up like this. He nods and rises, his thighs doing the majority of the work, Aster’s cock sliding almost entirely out of his body before he sinks back down, faster than is perhaps wise. Then again, and again, and  _ again,  _ the sound of skin on skin and their harsh breathing the only sounds in the room.

Jack loses count, loses everything but the sensation of their bodies in tandem, Aster’s fingers leaving trails of little shocks all down his back as they fall to grip his waist, anchoring himself and giving him leverage to tilt his hips, driving him deeper. Jack thinks that if he went any deeper, he’d be touching Jack’s soul, and he arches back at that thought, accidentally changing the angle. Here, the thrusts are shallower, but each one strokes  _ just  _ so over his prostate, and he’s making these noises he’d be really embarrassed about if Aster wasn’t moaning loud enough to shake the walls, probably.

‘Are you a screamer?’ Jack asks, the syllables broken up by his gulping breaths. Aster’s response is a groan that seems to come from the depths of the earth, hard and loud enough that Jack can feel it vibrate in the skin of his thighs, where they’re clamped tight to either side of Aster’s torso. Aster’s voice has been a problem for Jack from the fucking  _ beginning,  _ all drawling Australian strine and warm tone and clever turns of phrase, and Jack snaps his hips down at that. ‘Okay, yeah, awesome, I can work with that,’ Jack breathes, and goes to palm his own cock. He only gets in a stroke or two before Aster’s right hand leaves his left hip and gently knocks Jack’s hand aside.

‘If ye’ll - let me have - the honour, love,’ Aster says between those fucking  _ noises,  _ and Jack’s out of words, can only nod and watch as Aster’s hand closes around him, loosely strokes in time to their hard thrusts, and Jack’s frankly never fucked someone this hard, like he’s - like he’s dying for it, his mind supplies, and when Jack spares a thought towards the idea of hypothetically having to stop, he thinks he actually  _ might. _

Its doesn’t take much after that, not after all of the teasing, not with the way Aster’s richly brown skin looks against the angry red of Jack’s cock, not with the beautiful picture they have to be making that’s enough to make Jack choke when he thinks about it.

Jack slams his hips down, grinding them against Aster’s, and comes hard enough to knock the breath out of him. Aster doesn’t quite scream, but it’s a very hoarse, very loud shout that leaves him at Jack’s movement, hand tightening on Jack’s hip and cock both. Jack keeps moving his hips like that, rocking so that Aster’s cock is a constant and heavy pressure against his prostate; after a few seconds, Jack can feel Aster’s cock twitching through his orgasm.

Jack only sees the pale splatter of his own come on Aster’s skin for a half second before he slumps forward, but it’s a beautiful image. He can’t wait until Aster lets him take those photos.

They breathe together, and for a moment, it’s like that first time on the couch, caught up in each other’s arms. After a minute or two, Aster rolls them, jostling himself free in the process. He takes a second to toss the condom, then returns to Jack’s arms, and if he thinks Jack doesn’t notice the way he’s practically covering him, he has another think coming. Jack will bring it up, later. Definitely.

Just not right now, because right now, he’s pleasantly sore, and the man he loves is alive and well, and also a spectacular lay.

Aster laughs helplessly when Jack passes along this information, and there’s no sound Jack loves more in this world.

  
  


There is a house in Jonesport, Maine, along Route 187. There are many houses in Jonesport, of course; it’s a small town, less than two thousand people, but everyone knows each others’ names, and everyone knows the house.

It is a little out of town, but only by maybe half a minute. It is neither too large, nor too small. It has a fence, but not one meant to keep things out or in. It’s painted pale blue. It contains ( _ contains _ being used liberally, of course) a garden ( _ garden  _ being used liberally, as well). There are flowers of all kinds, including some that do not, strictly speaking, grow in Maine. Or north of the tropics. Everything seems to flourish, here. Has for the past one hundred and thirty four years.

It is an old style house, but clearly well cared for and well loved. When people walk by (and not many do, though there are a few), they always hear laughter.

Everyone knows the two men who live there.  _ Everyone.  _ At this point, no one questions it. Sure, some of the older folk claim that it’s been the same two men, unchanged, since  _ their _ grandparents lived here, but  _ everyone _ knows that isn’t true. Sure, they never quite seem to age, but like all small towns, Jonesport saddles the line between ‘everyone knows everyone else’s business’ and ‘people’s business is their business’. These two schools of thought are not nearly as exclusive as they first appear.

They’re friendly enough. The taller of the two, skin a dark brown (not African American, he’s been very clear about that, but  _ Australian,  _ thank you very much), apparently paints. No one has ever figured out under what name he paints, because it can’t be his own. Anyone who knows art knows E. Aster Bunnymund died decades ago, after all. The shorter, white-haired and blue-eyed, is a photographer, and apparently an old-fashioned kind (film photography is unfashionable by at least twenty years, but he says it comes and goes with great authority that nobody feels quite confident enough to question.) Particularly enthusiastic history buffs will point out that a Jackson O. Frost was singlehandedly responsible for the resurgence in traditional photography back in 2046 after a long period of digital photography as the dominant artform, but everyone knows that it can’t be the same person. It’s 2136, so that would be ridiculous.

The two move with the the kind of grace and knowledge of each other’s presence that only comes with decades of cohabitation, though neither of them looks a day over forty and thirty, respectively. Friendly boys, though, and they are very involved in local affairs. Aster organises the Easter egg hunt every year and volunteers time in the after-school art program. Jack teaches ice skating and coaches hockey in the winter.

They have some strange friends, certainly. The one who comes every Christmas, and is the best Santa look-alike for the Santa photo-op at the general store (and has been for as long as anyone can remember). The local dentist, who has to be reminded of her patient’s names from time to time, but is very pleasant (and always seems to know the right time to schedule a checkup). And the one who only visits by night, though why they have a bonfire in the backyard every time he comes, no one knows (there is, of course, no other explanation for the warm yellow light shining from behind the house).

Friends aside, they’re very nice boys. Well loved around Jonesport. And if Aster’s eyes seem a bright, unearthly green when spring rolls around, or if sometimes there’s frost on the windows in Jack’s wake, even in August, well, strange things happen in New England, everyone knows. Ghost ships roam the coasts. Bridges can lead to another time.

Some even say a man was once brought back to life by his lover, someone who loved him enough to fight death and win. But that is, of course, just a ghost story. And  _ everyone _ knows ghost stories aren’t true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that, folks, is Jackrabbit Week 2016! Man, that was fun. From now on, though, sick!proser isn't allowed to plot stuff out that healthy!proser is going to write, because we can all unilaterally agree that this one was _weeeeeiiiiird._
> 
> Thank you all for joining me, and with any luck, I'll see you next year - same challenge, same place :D

**Author's Note:**

> Oh my god what have I done to myself
> 
> This is by far the most new things i've ever tried in a single fic. Human AU. Present tense. Modern AU. What am I even doing
> 
> That said, it's also very, very familiar (after all, have you ever known proser to turn down a good ghost story?)


End file.
